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75Melissa McCarthy is riveting in simply-penned moments of remorse and confession, adding tearful depth to her ace timing and formidable physical comedy.
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67The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.
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63Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another.
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63McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.
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63Preposterous, goofy and a clear ripoff of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Identity still manages to make off with just enough laughs to work, thanks to the wondrous McCarthy, one of the few actresses in Hollywood allowed to showcase her wit and charisma as much as her physique.
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63In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip."
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63The dialogue in Craig Mazin’s script crackles at its best, and the supporting characters (led by Robert Patrick as a grizzled skip chaser) have bizarrely funny moments.
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60The heart of this film is on the road with Bateman and McCarthy. If not for their brilliance, Identity Thief would be running on empty.
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60As is the case with other unsatisfactory diversions, it is entirely possible to ignore the worst parts of this movie, to drift along during the lulls, slide over the half-baked jokes and just wait for Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Bateman to do their things.
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58Identity Thief is a road movie with its creative lanes clogged, and a Mack truck comedian barreling through, anyway.
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58Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
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Feb 8, 201350Identity Thief is funny enough, but it needed to be darker, raunchier, and crazier to live up to the promise of its casting.
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50While the filmmakers might have shot for "Midnight Run," but settled for "Due Date," they wound up only achieving "Guilt Trip." Identity Thief is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails.
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Feb 6, 201350It wants to be "Midnight Run" meets "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," but it carries little of the dramatic heft and real-world semi-plausibility of those much superior efforts.
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50With Melissa McCarthy playing a one-woman demolition team who, for 95 percent of the running time, is a genuine affront to nature, there are unavoidably some laughs here, although the gifted comic actor got more of them in less screen time in her previous films than she does in this starring role.
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50With Identity Thief, Melissa McCarthy proves she's got what it takes to carry a feature, however meager the underlying material.
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45Such a catalog of missed opportunities, it probably makes sense just to list them.
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42Watching Identity Thief will steal nearly two hours of your life that you’ll never get back. It takes far more than it gives.
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40Clever premise, witless execution.
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Mar 11, 201340Melissa McCarthy’s over-the-top performance as a low-rung grifter enlivens what is otherwise a groan-worthy odd-couple comedy.
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40The result is exactly what you would expect from a concept whose odometer has been running for so long: uneven laughs, sparked largely by spurts of shock comedy but marred by a general sense of familiarity.
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40The ensuing road trip should be hilariously chaotic, a classic misadventure between two ill-matched travelers. Instead of “Midnight Run,” though, we get another gloss on the recent “Guilt Trip,” in which the concept is all that counts.
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Feb 7, 201340Everyone would have been better off if the editors had just cobbled together a 90-minute blooper reel and called it a day.
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Feb 6, 201340The film is ultimately unsatisfying, not as laugh-out-loud funny as it promises to be in the opening.
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Feb 5, 201340McCarthy gets bashed about like a Stooge, and she bashes back with riotous abandon. Sadly, the rest of the movie is a shambles. So, let it be said, this one time only: Here is a comedy that really could use more inter-gender violence.
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40No matter how may times Identity Thief switches tracks, nothing works — it fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a "Midnight Run"–style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls. No amount of stolen guises can fix it.
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38Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.
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38Suffering through this felonious farce could only inspire a prison riot.
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30It’s just a movie, with a dramatic arc that’s supposed to make all that mean stuff drift away into the ether as friendship is born, but it’s that look that hangs around like a bad smell.
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30It would be easier to forgive Identity Thief its overfamiliar comic setups and shameless gag-recycling if the movie’s second half didn’t make such an abrupt about-face from soliciting our revulsion to begging for our pity.
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25This feels a lot like some of the recent, unwatchable Adam Sandler offerings: boorish, unfunny comedy colliding with saccharine, quasi-dramatic filler.
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25An unsalvageable wreck.
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25Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.
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25Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.
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25McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut.
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25With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back.
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25The deadly dull action-comedy Identity Thief is an infuriating waste of time, on all sides of camera and screen. I did not know I could yawn angrily. This movie somehow proved it possible.
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25Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers.
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0Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.
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0I squirmed in my seat throughout Identity Thief, a colossally unfunny and misguided comedy.
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0Watch the trailer, if you must, but spare yourself the full experience: Identity Thief steals time.