Jared Madden

‘Funny People’ hits the top

// April 3rd, 2010 // Blog

Film making is a team sport, so I’m not to sure who I should demand the 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life back from. ‘Funny People’, a film by Judd Apatow starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, has officially hit the top of my “Worst Films Ever List”.

I should have liked this film, it had everything going for it but it failed to deliver by a long long way.

First the story this film is built on is nothing short of brilliant, a famous comedian has to deal with his own immortality due to a terminal illness and conscripts a novice comedian to write jokes for him and help him deal with the issues in his life. There is so much to work with here but it is this opportunity that sets up the greatest failing of this film, it is genuinely unfunny.

At two hours and twenty minutes long ‘Funny people’ could have easily been forty minutes shorter, it just seems to go on and on and on. Ultimately this is an indulgent film which exposes a director whose first priority was to make a film for his own reasons without thought to the audience.

This film has some great actors in it, Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, Leslie Mann and Eric Bana to name a few, all of these actors are capable and have proved they are capable of excellent performances, but they are never given a chance in ‘Funny People’.

There were some glimpses of how good this film could be, with some great scenes that would give me hope that the film is turning a corner, starting to go somewhere, but just as quickly as the hope surfaced it would be dashed by some of the worst comedy, concepts and storytelling I have ever seen. Ultimately the greatest failing of this film is its storytelling which is totally is incoherent, it could have easily been a story made up by a distracted drunk who had no idea how to get to the end of the story, repeatedly getting stuck on unimportant side aspects, with his mind and hands in his pants, trying to be funny but failing to be.

This is a film that could have been, but never had a chance to get there.