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100Funny People is a true brass ring effort, a reach for excellence that takes big risks. It's 146 minutes, with a story that's more European in feeling than American.
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88It's the work of a major talent. Apatow scores by crafting the film equivalent of a stand-up routine that encompasses the joy, pain, anger, loneliness and aching doubt that go into making an audience laugh.
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88The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.
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88Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.
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88The result is a raucously funny and poignant love letter to standup comics.
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88Funny People nimbly intersperses humor and reflection. It is a rumination on mortality, fame and life choices, punctuated with Apatow's trademark raunchy humor.
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80An absolute treat. In spite of its disappointing climax, this is Apatow's smartest, rudest and -- yes -- funniest film yet.
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80Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.
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80Apatow's richest, most complicated movie yet--a summing up of his feelings about comedy and its relation to the rest of existence.
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75The movie's power sneaks up on you, reminiscent of something screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond once famously described as "the Billy Wilder touch": A combination of the sweet and the sour, because even funny people, like you and I, aren't always being funny.
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75Funny People turns out to be fairly predictable, and not so rough. In a thoroughly satisfying way.
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75The sharpest parts of the movie hack through the Hollywood jungle with an insider's certitude. But Apatow is so grounded in the comedy circuit that he can't quite capture the emotional wavelength of the life-and-death drama.
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75It's refreshingly unformulaic, but a rambling mess. It's also tremendously funny.
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70Apatow is on the right track. In moving his adolescent male comedies into more adult realms, the humor sharpens and characters deepen.
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70Perhaps Simmons is the man Apatow fears he will become. If so, with Sandler's help the filmmaker's fashioned a solid work of self reflection. There's plenty to love and laugh along with here.
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Messy but engaging comedy.
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67Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow's maturation as an artist.
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67Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.
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6350 percent good and 50 percent close.
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63The movie wears thin its welcome a couple of reels before Apatow has finished telling his story.
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63The drama aspect is necessary to the story, but it just drags on too long.
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63It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.
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There's so much that's so disarmingly good and sharp about Funny People that you wish the whole movie weren't so much of a shambles.
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60Apatow answers to no one. His worst enemy as a director is his unwillingness to linger in the dark places from which his comedy springs.
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60Amusing and engaging yet lacking in snap and cohesion, this insider's look at the world of standup comics in contempo Los Angeles rings true in its view of the variously warped, stunted and narrow lives of its mostly male denizens.
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58You find yourself wishing that Apatow had managed a script that was either really funny or about real people instead of this half-baked pseudo-memoir that's neither.
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50What's best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.
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Apatow wants to be taken seriously. Funny People is the attempt to raise his game a notch – and it fails.
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50Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.
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50That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia.
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42The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.
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40Funny People is an ambitious, misshapen picture that feels like two, maybe even three, separate movies uncomfortably jammed into one.
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Any sort of new insight into comedy's darker themes, to say nothing of life's, eludes Funny People. Instead Sandler and Rogen and the rest are left to wander aimlessly, with tedious comedy gigs, an even more tedious faux sitcom and relatively vapid relationships masquerading as a plot.
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40There's something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures.
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30Gets old fast.
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30The denizens of Judd Apatow's Funny People have been pulled every which way to fit a misshapen concept, yet they remain painfully unfunny, and consistently off-putting.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 61 out of 94
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Mixed: 9 out of 94
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Negative: 24 out of 94
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DotFail5This would've been much better if Apatow had left his wife, kids and 30 minutes out of it.
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