Identity Thief

There is a gratuitous scene in the middle of Identity Thief that adds nothing to the plot but that is meant — I’m just guessing here — to add to the humor of the thing. Our heroes, the eponymous Identity Thief who sometimes goes under the name of Diana (Melissa McCarthy) and the man whose identity she has stolen, Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman), are now teamed up together, as is the natural way of comic criminals and their victims, and on the run from three different pursuers. Two of these, Julian (played by an actor, Clifford Joseph Harris Jr., who sometimes goes under the name of T.I.) and Marisol (Genesis Rodriguez), who are acting as agents of an unseen criminal to whom Sandy owes money, are also teamed up. Diana has recently had a comic sexual encounter with a man known as Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet) whom she met in a bar in rural Georgia. Big Chuck turns out to be a real estate agent and Julian and Marisol visit his office pretending to be prospective house purchasers in order to pick up a clue as to which way Diana and Sandy have gone. Got that so far? Big Chuck, taking Julian and Marisol at face value, explains to them that his little Georgia town is a "traditional community" and then, perhaps because he thinks — not without some reason — that they are rather dim, he explains to them that "traditional" means they don’t like black people and foreigners. Julian is black and Marisol, being unspecified Hispanic, is foreign — and black, as Big Chuck also explains, since his fellow Neanderthal devotees of tradition thereabouts regard any complexion lighter than that of the Narcissus papyraceus as functionally black. It was a bit of a disappointment to me that Big Chuck should turn out to be a racist — like, apparently, everyone else in town — since I had already grown used to him as a comic and rather sympathetic character who had recently lost his wife. But for some reason the film seems to have felt it needed to sacrifice him to make the point that "tradition" ...