All that good will Melissa McCarthy had after “Bridesmaids”? Completely undone by “Identity Thief,” an obnoxious comedy made worse by obnoxious sentimentality. Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for. 
 
 Unless, of course, fat ladies rubbing their crotches and braying like mules is your idea of comedy gold, in which case, here’s your swill of the week. Jason Bateman, trying manfully to hold on to his dignity, plays Sandy Patterson, a Denver corporate drone with a pregnant wife (Amanda Peet) and two little girls (sisters Mary-Charles and Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Mr. Average, in other words. McCarthy is Diana, a cheerful sociopath who smooth-talks Sandy out of his credit information over the phone and goes on a Florida shopping spree that ends up with the cops at her victim’s door. 
 
 The few laughs come early, via Diana’s infectious shopaholic glee; few people in the movies enjoy themselves as enjoyably as McCarthy. Then the script by Craig Mazin and Jerry Eeten tortures itself in an effort to get Sandy and Diana together and on a road trip back to Denver, where he can turn her over to the law and convince his boss (John Cho) of his innocence. No, it doesn’t make sense. Nothing in this movie makes sense. Next to “Identity Thief,” “Inception” is a marvel of sober concision. 
 
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 On the couple’s trail are a psychotic debt collector (Robert Patrick, looking like a methed-out Kris Kristofferson) and two sharply dressed members of a drug cartel (Genesis Rodriguez and rapper T.I.) who want Diana dead for reasons even the screenwriters can’t figure out. Director Seth Gordon — who had a promising little career making documentaries like “The King of Kong” before going Hollywood with dreck like “Horrible Bosses” — puts more energy into the car chases than anything that passes for recognizable human behavior. 
 
 At 108 minutes, “Identity Thief” goes on forever, and you start ticking off the comedy clichés and story beats to keep tedium at bay: Scene where McCarthy sings badly to ’70s oldies on the car radio, check. Scene where Bateman loses his pants, check. Scene where McCarthy sees a picture of Bateman’s kids and goes all gooey, sigh. 
 
 And obligatory fat-guy butt cheeks, obviously. In what you’d think would be the low point of “Identity Thief,” Diana invites a portly gent named Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet) back to a motel room for a furniture-wrecking bout of kinky sex while Sandy cowers in the bathroom. If the filmmakers really wanted to push the envelope, they’d throw Sandy and Diana into bed together, but that might scare the paying customers. The movie’s general attitude toward large people is that they’re just regular folks once you’re done making fun of them. 
 
 Actually, the rock-bottom nadir of “Identity Thief” would have to be the scenes that try to gin up sympathy for Diana: a weepy monologue about her foster-home upbringing and a late-inning makeover that gives the character a “sensible” hairdo and a tasteful black dress. It’s like putting a circus clown in a chador — what’s the point? As a comedy star, McCarthy lives by aggression and the belief that she’s the hottest thing on the planet. Her obliviousness empowers her; that’s the joke, and she’s in on it. In “Identity Thief,” the joke’s on her, and everyone comes out a loser. ||||| How many ways can a grown person waste valuable time and lose vital I.Q. points at the same time? If you’re a movie critic, the possibilities are unlimited. And they all come together in a new chunk of junk called Identity Thief. 
 
 IDENTITY THIEF ★ 
 
 (1/4 stars) Written by: Craig Mazin 
 
 Directed by: Seth Gordon 
 
 Starring: Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy and John Cho 
 
 Running time: 111 min. 
 
 In the trashy, stupefying screenplay by Craig Mazin, Jason Bateman is a Denver accountant named Sandy Patterson—another in a long line of victims of the increasingly dangerous world of cyber-crime—whose credit card has been hacked and copied by a felonious thief in Miami (cacophonous, tractor-sized Melissa McCarthy). Now there are two Sandy Pattersons—an innocent fraud victim on one side of the country facing bankruptcy and a screeching, humongous creep on a marathon shopping spree on the other side of the country who is running up thousands of dollars in charges and wrecking her victim’s credit rating in the process. The police do nothing, the male Sandy loses his job and faces jail time, and the only solution is to devise a plan to apprehend the fake, female Sandy and drag her from Florida back to Colorado to turn herself in and clear his good name. In order to stretch a five-minute idea into 107 minutes of contrived drivel some people may mistake for plot, the plan backfires. She beats him up, steals his wallet, wrecks his rental car and leaves him stranded on the highway in a pair of pants stolen from a dead hobo. With no identification or money, he gets arrested for assaulting an officer, drug dealing and illegal gun possession. And still, against all odds, they hit the road to Colorado pursued by killers, bounty hunters and “skip tracers,” who track down crooks who owe money to gangsters, jump parole and get involved in other intrigues invented by hack Hollywood screenwriters. The snafus in the worst road movie since The Guilt Trip plunge Mr. Bateman and his female hippo into a motel with only a double bed, a grotesque sex scene with a pickled reprobate she picks up in a bar who demands a threesome, a violent bar fight that bloodies his nose, a kidnapping, a multi-car collision going the wrong way on the freeway … but why go on? They seem to be making it up as they go along, in a movie that threatens never to end. 
 
 By the time they got lost in the woods and fall into a den of hissing snakes, Elvis has long since left the building. Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids) is a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success. Poor Jason Bateman. How did an actor so charming, talented, attractive and versatile get stuck in so much dreck? Identity theft is a real plague that is happening so often that people tremble every time they approach an ATM. It’s a deserving subject that should be explored in a more viable film, but Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers. ||||| 'Identity Thief' review: A case of fraud MOVIE REVIEW 
 
 Photo: Bob Mahoney, Universal Pictures Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 Jason Bateman plays a sweet guy whose credit cards and identity are stolen by a manic con woman played by Melissa McCarthy. Jason Bateman plays a sweet guy whose credit cards and identity are stolen by a manic con woman played by Melissa McCarthy. Photo: Bob Mahoney, Universal Pictures 'Identity Thief' review: A case of fraud 1 / 1 Back to Gallery 
 
 Identity Thief 
 
 Comedy. Starring Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman. Directed by Seth Gordon. (R. 111 minutes.) 
 
 Think of this as a movie review or as just a friendly warning from a like-minded individual: "Identity Thief" looked really good from a distance. In fact, it looked like it couldn't miss. Melissa McCarthy has emerged in the last two years as one of the funniest and most promising comic actresses around, and the idea of matching her exuberant relentlessness with Jason Bateman's long-suffering sardonicism (yes, that's really a word) seemed inspired. 
 
 Indeed, it was inspired. It inspired financial backing, an advertising campaign, two estimable talents and all the moviegoers who are planning to see it this weekend. The only people it most certainly didn't inspire were Craig Mazin and Jerry Eeten, who wrote the screenplay. "Identity Thief" is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy. 
 
 What seemed like a good idea - a comedy based on the phenomenon of identity theft - turned out to be comic quicksand. McCarthy plays Diana, a Florida woman who has made a life of stealing people's identities, getting fake credit cards under the stolen name and running up enormous bills. Her latest victim is a nice guy named Sandy on the other side of the country, who gets an inkling something is wrong when his credit card is rejected at a gas station. His second clue comes when the cops arrest him for having been drunk and disorderly in Florida. He's in Denver. 
 
 If you've followed along this far, you might already be able to diagnose the movie's fatal flaw: The concept of one person stealing another's identity might be amusing in the abstract, but the minute you start filling in the details, it becomes the stuff of drama, not comedy. This is especially the case in "Identity Thief," in which Sandy (Bateman) is a sweet guy, a hardworking family man with a third child on the way, who has finally lucked into a high-paying job. But now he faces dismissal, the complete destruction of his life, because of an imbecile in Florida. 
 
 "Identity Thief" is constructed, believe it or not, as a road movie, a buddy comedy, in which two seeming opposites find common ground. Sandy goes down to Florida to bring Diana back to Denver so she can explain the whole situation to his boss. That a borderline sociopath would do a favor for a complete stranger - one who clearly means her ill - is far-fetched even in the loose terms of zany comedy. Even if she wanted to leave town, there is no reason she wouldn't ditch him at some point along the way. 
 
 Actually, "Identity Thief" seems to be an attempt to wed a hot topic to the structure of "Midnight Run," the 1988 classic starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Call it a coincidence, but both films feature two antagonists on a cross-country trip. In both, they're chased by mobsters (played here by T.I. and Genesis Rodriguez) and by a bounty hunter (played here by Robert Patrick). In "Midnight Run," the men become better people for knowing each other, whereas "Identity Thief" is so clumsily written that we're told that that happens, even though it doesn't. "You taught me about getting what you want," Sandy tells his nemesis, "and about confidence." 
 
 There are holes in the story you could float a blimp through and loose ends everywhere, but none of that would matter if "Identity Thief" had a spark of joy, some honest life to it. There is none. It's just an irritant, and the worst kind to boot, one that resorts to fake sentiment in the end, like a scoundrel begging for a reprieve. Yes, two or three times McCarthy, through an unexpected reading of a weak line, can coax a laugh - she's that talented - and Bateman is true to his role, which is to be a dramatic character facing personal tragedy who just happens to be stuck in a supposed comedy. 
 
 But that's the best that can be said for "Identity Thief," and even that's not much. ||||| If recent misfires like “Tammy” and “Identity Thief” have proved anything, it’s that Melissa McCarthy is virtually indestructible, retaining her comic buoyancy, her tremendous likability and much of her fan base even when stuck with bargain-basement material. All of which makes it even more gratifying to see what she can do with a vehicle that’s firing on all cylinders for a change. In “Spy,” an uproarious blast of globe-trotting action-comedy delirium that doesn’t spoof the espionage-thriller genre so much as drop a series of banana peels in its path, McCarthy plays an eager-to-please desk jockey turned full-blown CIA operative who learns to wield a gun as skillfully as she does a one-liner — a dazzling transformation that represents the actress’s smartest, funniest, most versatile and fully sustained bigscreen showcase to date. Unsurprisingly, her key collaborator here is once again Paul Feig, who directed her to such show-stopping effect in “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat,” and Fox’s June 5 release will more than earn its place in the company of those past summer hits. 
 
 If “The Heat” (2013) placed its righteous gender politics front and center, pairing McCarthy with Sandra Bullock as a happy corrective to the male-dominated buddy-comedy tradition, then “Spy,” a vastly richer and more intricately conceived piece of work, succeeds in scoring a subtler representational coup. To call it feminist would hardly be inaccurate, but it might risk diminishing the singularity of McCarthy’s achievement: It’s not every woman (and certainly not every man) who can juggle the often-conflicting priorities of action and comedy as skillfully as she does here. Put another way, it’s hard to think of another performer, male or female, who could leap onto a motorcycle and immediately topple over sideways, and pull off the gag with such fumbling precision — or is it precise fumbling? — that it can only be described as graceful. 
 
 Admittedly, Susan Cooper (McCarthy), a fortysomething analyst stuck behind a desk in a vermin-ridden basement at CIA headquarters, doesn’t seem wired for action at first. The film opens with an extended combat sequence in Bulgaria, where a suave James Bond type named Bradley Fine (Jude Law) blows away a series of thugs as he tries to locate a nuclear bomb. His secret weapon, however, turns out to be Susan, who communicates with Fine via hidden earpiece, using all manner of high-tech surveillance equipment to maneuver him past every obstacle and enemy assailant. It’s a highly effective working relationship, albeit one that invariably leaves the hard-working Susan feeling more like a secretary or assistant than an equal, never mind that she has years of successful field training under her belt. It doesn’t help that she’s nursing a major unrequited crush on Fine, who, much like everyone else, looks at her and sees a single, middle-aged, overweight loner whose Agency career has probably already peaked. 
 
 But when Fine is suddenly assassinated by a haughty Bulgarian arms dealer named Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), who somehow knows the identities of all the CIA’s top operatives, Susan becomes determined to enter the field herself for the first time and avenge her partner’s death, arguing that she’s the only one who won’t be recognized. Against the protests of surly agent Richard Ford (Jason Statham, hilariously sending up his meathead persona), the Agency chief (Allison Janney) reluctantly agrees, though she forbids Susan to put herself in harm’s way and sends her to Paris on a basic track-and-report mission. Should her intel prove valuable, it could lead them not only to Rayna but also to Sergio De Luca (Bobby Cannavale), a greasy-haired terrorist who’s trying to acquire the nuke for his own nefarious, loosely Al Qaeda-related reasons. (The plot, outlined here at lightning speed, never makes more sense than it has to.) 
 
 Feig’s beautifully structured, zinger-stuffed screenplay mines no shortage of amusement from the spectacle of Susan being briefed and prepped for duty: The Agency’s resident Q type fills her purse with high-tech gadgets, all sadly disguised as items that a woman like her would carry (hemorrhoid patches, stool softeners, etc.). Meanwhile, every phony alias and passport she’s assigned is invariably that of some frumpy Midwestern tourist; as Susan notes, “I look like someone’s homophobic aunt.” The comedy here has a shrewd double edge: On a certain level, Feig and McCarthy may well be inviting us to laugh at the sight of Susan in a bouffant wig and an oversized cat T-shirt, but they’re also taking deliberate aim at the sort of mentality that would write her off as a hopelessly unattractive loser in the first place. 
 
 Eventually, Susan’s mission takes her from Paris to Rome to Budapest — guided via earpierce by her easily excitable colleague Nancy (the delightfully dithering Miranda Hart), and accompanied much of the time by an overly amorous Italian associate, Aldo (British actor Peter Serafinowicz). Eventually Susan is required to drop the ugly-American guise and pass herself off as Rayna’s personal bodyguard — an inspired masquerade that necessitates the sort of radiant physical makeover that, between this and “Identity Thief,” might well become a semi-regular Melissa McCarthy movie trope. More crucially, however, it allows the actress’s head-butting, expletive-hurling, take-no-prisoners personality to emerge in full force, as Susan puts aside her earlier timidity and taps into the inner core of rage that, as neatly foreshadowed in the script, once made her one of the CIA’s most promising (and vicious) trainees before she was sidelined into a desk job. 
 
 Whether she’s dangling from the bottom of a helicopter, slamming a metal pot over the head of a knife-wielding assassin (Bollywood actress Nargis Fakhri), vomiting in disbelief over the corpse of a henchman she’s just eliminated, or kicking the crap out of some “Swedish motherf—er” just for the hell of it, McCarthy’s performance is a never-ending succession of priceless moments. For all her strengths as a verbal and physical performer, there’s a real core of emotion here, too; remarkably, she manages to pull all these disparate extremes of violence and comedy into a stirring, coherent portrait of a woman motivated by love, loyalty and a courageous if unrealized sense of her own inner worth. 
 
 For some, the term “action-comedy hybrid” may trigger dire memories of earlier studio mediocrities like “Knight and Day,” “Killers” and “The Bounty Hunter,” in which the two genres blended about as harmoniously as oil and water. By contrast, “Spy” gets the balance almost exactly right, predicated on the eminently sensible notion that a well-timed verbal jab can help punch up an action scene, while a high-speed car chase can only be improved with some discreet breast groping. Even when the violence catches you off guard with its sudden ferocity, it works in no small part because Feig, avoiding the surreal silliness of an “Austin Powers”-style sendup, maintains a surprisingly straight face even as he pursues a humorously skewed angle on the world of international espionage. 
 
 In keeping with this approach, the actors have mastered the art of inhabiting two different worlds simultaneously, tossing off even their funnier lines without breaking character. Having emerged as a comedic powerhouse in “Bridesmaids” and “Neighbors,” Byrne is no less brilliant here with her crimson lips, mile-high coiffure and supreme hauteur. Statham’s Ford, staying out of the action spotlight for a change, is mainly on hand to perform an ongoing riff in which he tries to convince Susan she’s not cut out for the job, rattling off various examples of his own tolerance for extreme pain (i.e., having to sew one arm back on with the other) that could well have been ripped from the many indifferent shoot-’em-ups littering his resume. Law, clearly having fun playing Bond for a day, brings an extra shot of star power to the across-the-board superb supporting cast. 
 
 The film’s scenic international locations and spy-thriller orientation have called forth a much higher level of technical polish than usual for a studio comedy, as evidenced by d.p. Robert Yeoman’s slick lensing, Jefferson Sage’s elaborate production design, a sexy-satirical Bond-style opening credits sequence, and action scenes of startlingly visceral impact (some of them achieved with some noticeable digital tweaking). The print reviewed at SXSW didn’t include closing credits, leaving an incomplete running time of 115 minutes.
– No matter how much you like Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, critics are urging you to decline Identity Thief, their new—sadly conventional and unfunny—buddy comedy. Here's what critics are saying, including one who got himself in hot water: As a fan of Bateman and McCarthy, Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to like it. But "what seemed like a good idea—a comedy based on the phenomenon of identity theft—turned out to be comic quicksand," because having your life ruined at random isn't really funny. Bateman comes off as "a dramatic character facing personal tragedy who just happens to be stuck in a supposed comedy." The screenplay "tortures itself" to get its leads on a buddy-movie-esque road trip together, complains Ty Burr at the Boston Globe. "No, it doesn't make sense. Nothing in this movie makes sense. Next to Identity Thief, Inception is a marvel of sober concision." It's littered with "comedy clichés," and worse, an "obnoxious sentimentality," like the "generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie." Rex Reed at the New York Observer has drawn criticism of his own for calling McCarthy a "tractor-sized" "female hippo" who "has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success." Many have decried the review as sexist. "Have you ever read a review where a male actor was described this way?" asks Adriana Velez at The Stir, pointing out the host of plus-sized male comedians who haven't faced that kind of ridicule. Meanwhile Manohla Dargis at the New York Times thinks McCarthy is the best part of the movie, "the supernova who burns up this show." But ultimately this is "a lazy comedy" that isn't subversive enough to really cut her loose. "Order must be restored, the family reunited, the wild woman tamed." Everyone must learn a lesson, "and then everything will fit tidily, phonily together."