Funny People

What happened to Judd Apatow? That question plagued me for the entire gruelling duration of the comedy master's latest movie, the awkwardly unfunny dud titled Funny People. Apatow rose to superstardom in the summer of 2005 when his tender, hilarious flick The 40-Year-Old Virgin became the sleeper hit of that season. Suddenly, Apatow was one of the hottest brands in Hollywood and his name was virtually everywhere a short while after. Since then, the talented filmmaker has produced a pile of popular comedy movies, such as Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express, while also directing his sophomore feature, the wonderfully brilliant Knocked Up.

So, armed with all of the money and creative freedom a filmmaker could ask for, Apatow has now taken a strange stumble with his third feature, which basically boils down to 146 minutes of wretchedly useless nonsense. Comedy superstar Adam Sandler takes a break from making throwaway family movies to star as comedy superstar George Simmons, who is basically, well, Adam Sandler with a different name. Simmons has the same obnoxious sense of humour that made Sandler famous and his empire has been built on the same kind of goofy garbage that catapulted Sandler into the land of fame and fortune.

George Simmons spends his days wandering around his mansion, swimming in his pool, and romancing various women who can't see past his fame. He lives a charmed life, but the whole thing turns out to be a facade, because George is really crying on the inside. His problem is that he has no one to give his love to and no one to love him in return. Boo hoo. Let's all break out the Kleenex. Then again, if anyone can take such a hackneyed character dilemma and turn it into something honest and interesting, it's Apatow... or maybe not. Instead of unearthing some touching emotional elements in this silly story, the writer-director moves in the opposite direction and makes the whole thing even more pitifully lazy.

During a visit to his doctor, George receives the terrible news that he has a potentially fatal blood disease linked to Leukemia. Now that George has a bona fide reason to be upset, his other problems begin to pale in comparison. Feeling the walls closing in on his existence, George decides to return to his roots and generate a few laughs with a new stand-up comedy routine. During his first night at a local comedy club, George meets up-and-comer Ira (the usually reliable Seth Rogen, now coming closer to phoning in a performance than he even has before). The pair hit it off quite quickly and it isn't long before George is calling to hire Ira as his personal assistant and joke-writer.

From this point on, Funny People goes through the motions, constantly see-sawing back and forth between jokes and tears, neither of which are very successful at all. A number of other characters enter and exit the story with little to no purpose, other than to stuff this bloated mess to the point of nearly bursting. George and Ira's relationship continues to move along without ever becoming funnier or more heartfelt. Both characters are whiny, irritating jerks who fill the screen with their relentless self-loathing. Each of them pine for a woman, with Ira setting his sights on a fellow comic named Daisy (Aubrey Plaza) and George yearning for "the one that got away" (Leslie Mann, who happens to be Apatow's wife in the real world).

Apatow's past movies have found sweet and moving ways to navigate the conflicting territory of raunchy comedy and tender romance, but Funny People's romantic threads are too flimsy to make an impression. Apatow's latest seems to suffer from a debilitating identity crisis. From beginning to end, Funny People has no idea what kind of movie it is striving to be. Is it a comedy that wants to be a drama, or a drama that wants to be a comedy? There's no point in pondering those questions for very long, because the movie fails epically on both fronts. In the entire 146 minutes, Apatow can barely muster up a chuckle-worthy joke or a touching, believable emotion. The movie just coasts along on a tiresome wave of penis jokes that were a lot funnier the first 50 times I heard them in past Apatow efforts.

I wish I could applaud Apatow for attempting to broaden his horizons, but Funny People is really just a meandering, needlessly sentimental version of the movies he's already made. The story is once again focused on boys in men's bodies who must learn to grow up and accept responsibility. But in trying to craft a more dramatic version of the familiar tale, Apatow has only pumped his movie full of hot air. The result is a mess, one that hopefully represents a creative misstep for Apatow and not a woeful sign of things to come. But no matter where he goes from here, the comedy filmmaker has unleashed his first stinker, an embarrassing collection of vulgarity and weepy, heartstring-tugging montages. There's nothing funny about these people, other than their pathetic, misguided attempts to make us laugh and cry all at once.