Funny People Review

For an hour this is the best film Apatow has made. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons as a man who has bought everything and connected with nobody, and the performance is unsparing about the vanity and the loneliness in a way Sandler had never been asked for. Janusz Kaminski shoots it with a gravity the director's other comedies never get, and the club material is the most accurate portrait of working stand up any studio has put on screen. Rogen's Ira is the audience surrogate and he plays the decency without softening it.

Then the diagnosis reverses, the film relocates to a house in Marin for a long third act about a marriage it has not earned, and the near unanimous complaint follows: the movie changes subject exactly when it gets good, and it runs almost two and a half hours doing so. Eric Bana is entertaining and irrelevant. The jokes thin out in the last hour and the stakes evaporate the moment George is no longer dying. Critics admire the reach and the honesty about how unpleasant funny people can be, and they do not forgive the shapelessness.