Identity Thief

Loved Planes, Trains & Automobiles growing up.

Arguably both John Candy and Steve Martin's best movie, it brought together two of Hollywood's leading comedic actors, set them up as a mismatched pair, simultaneously catered to bourgeois and working class sympathies, and used Thanksgiving to tie everything together.

By the end of the film, Neal Page (Martin) has been transformed from a cold representative of the bad bourgeoisie who have no social conscience to someone who will at least invite a lonely friend to his home for dinner.

Del Griffith (Candy) smiles, everyone's happy, the end.

26 years later, Seth Gordon's Identity Thief works within the same paradigm, but the cultural codes of the game have changed.

If we're to take the information provided in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story as solid indisputable fact, unions had generated stable, prosperous bourgeois lives for many working Americans until their strength was weakened by the Reagan administration and many of their jobs shipped elsewhere, some, in the interests of capitalism, to at least one communist country.

Theoretically, a significant proportion of the American population were no longer able to maintain their suburban lifestyles (in the same location over a long period of time) and found themselves individually competing for new jobs in a pop cultural system that vilified anything besides the undeniably exceptional.

Does this theory resonate throughout little old unsuspecting Identity Thief?

I don't know, but here's my take.

Lead character Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman) is struggling to get by, working for a corporation who only values the contributions of upper management, living with his wife and two kids.

He's played his cards right but at the end of the month only has a little more than 14 dollars of potential savings to show for it.

And trouble's a brewin.'

Diana (Melissa McCarthy) makes her living stealing peoples identities and using them to finance her freewheelin' acquisitive lifestyle (Patterson seems like he's too smart to have fallen for her scam, but that's another matter).

She steals that of Mr. Patterson just as he launches a career as the vice-president of a new company.

Naturally he's pissed, and sets out for Florida to confront and bring her back to Denver, due to infrastructural peculiarities that prevent the Denver PD from working with their Floridian counterparts.

But he's not the only one in hot pursuit, for she's run afoul of others seeking vengeance who track and attempt to overcome Sandy and Diana after Sandy captures her.

By the end of the film, Sandy's developed a social conscience at least to the degree where he cares about one of the proletarian characters who ends up in jail.

Most of the proletarian characters (likely) end up in jail.

Thus, as good jobs become harder to find than they were in the 1980s, working American people find themselves resorting to a higher degree of criminal activity, much more violent than John Candy's family friendly shenanigans, corporate upper management remains influential and unaffected unless those whom they disregard can out-compete them in the marketplace (hopefully without becoming like them during the struggle), wherein which these competitors might lose everything, as some seem to have even though they had stable unionized jobs, which possibly faltered due to their lack of a coordinated multidisciplinary international network.

Among thousands of other rather complicated factors of which I'm unaware.

Identity Thief's script contains a broader array of consistent characters than Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Melissa McCarthy's performance is strong enough to indicate that she may be able to function as a 21st century John Candy, there are some funny scenes which utilize sleaze as everyone chases, tricks, slanders, and/or shoots at one another, which seems to be the comic style of our time, but it's not attached to a holiday, and is missing a substitute for Steve Martin.

Jason Bateman's good. I love his work. Bold to compete with Steve Martin. I wouldn't even be able to order coffee for an extra's stunt double.

Genesis Rodriguez (Marisol) is my favourite real world name ever.

No mention of the Broncos.