Melissa McCarthy recently had a movie released called Tammy. The film received negative reviews from critics and marketing wasn’t exactly a spectacle. Even still, the film managed to make almost twice its budget while facing the 4th of July weekend and Transformers: Age of Extinction.
This shows the brewing popularity that McCarthy seems to have. I decided that it would be nice if I wrote up a review to commemorate the occasion.
Now, I won’t lie and say that I was looking forward to this film. Honestly, it has been taking up space on my DVR for the longest time and I finally decided that I needed to watch it in right a review.
That’s tough, because they say that you should never go into a movie expecting to hate it. If you watch a movie thinking it’ll suck, regardless of quality, you’ll walk out of it thinking that it sucked.
It’s either that, or because the movie really did suck.
Identity Thief is a 2013 American crime comedy film directed by Seth Gordon, whose acting chops include mostly, Horrible Bosses. Although, he’ll also be directing the Uncharted film-adaptation.
The film stars Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy. It received negative reviews from critics and audience-members alike, but managed to make nearly two-hundred million dollars worldwide at the box-office.
The film tells the story about a man whose identity is stolen. Basically, Jason Bateman plays a regular every-man that works in a office crunching numbers and whatnot. Meanwhile, his co-workers begin to start their own company. He joins them, but soon finds out that someone has been buying things under his name. Basically, he has to find this person or else he’ll face losing his job.
Identity Thief doesn’t have a story that we haven’t already seen five or six times before, which is fine. I mean, Horrible Bosses wasn’t original, but there was some entertainment-value. Horrible Bosses went for shock-value and profanity for the sake of it, whereas this movie merely seems desperate for a laugh. Melissa McCarthy has the best performance in this one, but she is also the character that I despise the most.
In the first forty or so minutes of the movie, her character was annoying. It wasn’t entertaining, it was annoying. It’s an out-of-shape person doing foolish and other-wise mean-spirited things, and I was expected to laugh at it. It’s a formula that has been done millions of times, and it honestly didn’t work the first.
Thankfully, McCarthy has some certain acting-chops that can be brought into it. They don’t save the day, but they soften the blow. I actually wondered what it would have been like if the film would have dealt with her in a more serious role. Perhaps dealing with compulsive lying and kleptomania.
In conclusion, the laughs are few, if any, and the plot doesn’t very much going for it. Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy work their darnedest to bring depth into the film, but it wasn’t on the card. The film doesn’t have an identity and isn’t anything wholesome or worthwhile.
Thanks for reading…