“Identity Thief” is difficult to sit through since the title character, played by Melissa McCarthy who got nominated as Oscar best supporting actress for “Bridesmaids”, is so bad that she’s just plain repulsive. Because of her nefarious activities after stealing the identity of Jason Bateman via his credit card, Jason now wallows in debt, gets arrested, imprisoned and even loses his job.
What’s worse is that the filmmakers want to make us laugh at her illegal activities that aren’t even funny to begin with. We guess this movie is trying to re-define what is “funny” but their humor is really so off-putting, just like what they did in “Horrible Bosses”, another reprehensible movie that’s meant to be a comedy but only ends up annoying us. There are scenes showing Melissa committing various crimes without compunction mixed with vomiting and gratuitous sex jokes .
Another writer who watched it till the end says there’s an attempt to explain why the character is behaving that way. She had such an unhappy childhood. He says the movie suddenly goes into dramatic mode to give her some redeeming factor, just like some of Adam Sandler flicks we’ve seen lately. But he says it’s so poorly written that even that failed to save the movie from being total garbage. Oh, are we glad we spared ourselves the ordeal of sitting through that by walking out early on. Are we supposed to forgive criminals just because they were treated badly as children? Come on! Save your money, this is a complete waste of time.
