Identity Thief (2013)

Identity Thief arrives as a 2013 road comedy in which a Denver accountant has his name pilfered by a Florida con artist, and the two of them drive across the country trading insults, snake bites, and assorted identity fraud. The project began life with two male leads before Jason Bateman watched Bridesmaids and insisted on Melissa McCarthy. That casting decision is the most culturally loaded thing about the enterprise, and the film itself seems entirely unaware of it.

The supporting cast is diverse in the way a modern studio call sheet is diverse: T.I. and Morris Chestnut as bounty hunters and pursuers, Genesis Rodriguez and John Cho in smaller turns. Their presence is ambient. Nobody remarks on it, and the screenplay has no interest in race as a subject. The same holds for the other categories we are obliged to weigh. There are no queer characters. No climate anxieties. The credit card fraud and the villainous corporate boss are gag machinery, not an indictment of late capitalism. No neurodivergent figures appear. The film's lone glancing moral gesture is a third-act plea for sympathy that asks us to feel for a woman who has spent ninety minutes fleecing strangers.

The body is the movie's recurring punchline, and McCarthy's physique supplies most of the physical comedy, a fact that generated more public discourse than the picture ever deserved. Reviewers debated whether her grotesque con-artist routine counted as feminist trailblazing or stereotype maintenance. The text offers no argument either way. What remains is a competently assembled studio comedy, briefly number one at the box office, and a curio for anyone cataloging how Hollywood handles a large woman with impeccable timing. The vintage is thin. We record it regardless.