'Identity Thief'

More Or Less BPD

I keep saying this but Borderline Personality Disorder is a great boon for dramatists and screenwriters. There's no end to the chaos a BPD character can introduce to ordinary life. In that vein we have 'Identity Thief', a film built around Melissa McCarthy's ability to play the most obnoxious kind of chaos hurler, matched against Jason Bateman's ability to play the most meek of American men. It's sadist's dream!

What's Good About It

I'm struggling with this one. There ought to be something likeable in this middling film, but it's hard to say what that is. The casting is ordinary, the writing is ordinary, the laughs are chuckles and not exactly coming hard and fast.

I might say that the best thing about this film is that Robert Patrick plays a really mean hillbilly cleaner. Jonathan Banks - Mike from 'Breaking Bad' - makes a cameo appearance of sorts that never really connects itself to the plot. It doesn't make much sense, but he brings a smile because his persona is consistent with Mike the cleaner from 'Breaking Bad'. It's pretty much that kind of movie.

What's Bad About It

It's slow and messy and not very well thought out. It takes until about 35minutes in to get the both of them in a car on the road to Denver from Florida an you come to realise that it's a road movie. "Surprise!" Well, it's certainly no 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles'; it's not even 'Due Date'. The usual tropes of crashed rented vehicles and hitching in the boonies of America turn up and none of is done with any wit. Its a shame because McCarthy and Bateman are fine actors who can make a good deal out of a good script. Alas, this is not that script.

The garbled, hoodlums-cahsing-after-the-main-characters subplot goes nowhere and sort of destroys itself on the runway without taking off. At least it wasn't the stock Russian Mafia in Black 4WDs with their Russian submachine guns letting loose. The lack of any explanation whatsoever about this part of the story forces the movie to spend lots of screen time on boring people -and they're boring because we never know what they're doing and what their story might be.

Yes, it's quite an ordinary movie.

What's Interesting About It

The film sort of comes at the interesting notion that the reason we have identities is so that we can track monies and attach them to names. The mechanism by which we do this is through banking. So banking has a privileged position when it comes to knowing who we are and what we do. Having started at that point, the comedy doesn't really go into exploring the ramifications of misplaced ciphers - i.e falsely applied identity - it then chooses to spend a great deal of time on the road with a BPD person.

When everybody is up in arms about the NSA spying through emails and whatnot, nobody seems to have the equal amounts of furious angst about just how much your bank has you and your identity by the short and curlies.