Funny People

We had presumed there were trade and advertising regulations against this sort of thing. Had the relevant authorities been on the ball, surely Judd Apatow’s third and weakest outing as a director would not have been called Funny People? There are, as Nelson Munz once said of Naked Lunch, at least two things wrong with that title.
The film that might be more appositely wrought as Two-and-a-Half Hours of Total Tedium or Unedited Garbage wastes Adam Sandler in an ill-defined, pointless tears-of-a-clown yarn. It’s not a terrible premise:  funny man George Simmons (Sandler playing a meta-fictional Sandler) is already a miserable sod when he learns that his time is nearly up. As the doctor explains that neither radiation or chemotherapy can help, Sandler gazes over his shoulder at family pictures, thus setting the queasily uneven tone of the movie.
Seth Rogen, playing the flailing comedian who becomes Sandler’s bromance buddy, gets to say cock and balls a lot. Many talented comic performers - most notably Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman - also turn out to reference their genitalia. True, this may not be the least effective default setting for hilarity but it does get tiresome and half-arsed after the first 164 times when there‘s still two hours of the movie to go.
At any rate, it’s hard to see fans of the cock and balls milieu getting overly enthusiastic about the rest of the flick: Mr Sandler pines for his first love, Leslie Mann, who, even when she’s trying to be soft and mumsy, comes across like the thespian equivalent of nails down a blackboard. (Of course, this being an Apatow picture, she’s still the only female character that isn’t an outright skank.) There are montages of little girls and hula-hoops in slow motion as Sandler threatens to become a kinder, better person, but this sprawling, unsteady vehicle can’t decide where it’s at or where it’s going. Suddenly he gets the all clear but the film keeps pottering along regardless.
We’ve seen Mr Sandler do serious turns (Punch Drunk Love, Reign Over Me) to much greater affect than the sub-Waterboy mumbling he doers here. The blame for Funny People‘s failure to be funny in any way, however, must largely fall on former Hollywood Golden Boy Judd Apatow. A bunch of rambling celebrity cameos between lacklustre dramatic scenes does not a movie make. Indeed, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it presence of such luminaries as Sarah Silverman reminds us that Funny People, like charity records for Africa, is alarming proof that a lot of talented folks can put their heads together and produce a whole lot of rubbish.