Funny People

funnypeople

Adam Sander stars as George Simmons, a former stand-up comedian that now lives alone in a huge mansion made with his millions from making family-friendly comedies that look like a mash up between current Eddie Murphy and The Rock films. George finds out he’s been diagnosed with leukemia and is given a death sentence. He has decided he wants to get back to stand-up, but lost his knack for it, so he hires an up-and-coming stand-up, Ira Wright (Seth Rogan) to write jokes for him while also being his assistant. He realizes he’s been a jerk a good portion of his adult life and says goodbye to many people, including the one woman that he let get away when he cheated on her many years ago. Then, he miraculously gets better and decides he needs to win the woman, Laura (Leslie Mann) back, even though she is married with two kids.

That is the main plot of the movie and it has a lot of things going on, but there are so many subplots in the movie that make it so much longer than it needs to be. I enjoyed the movie, but it was unnecessarily long. It really needed some editing. There’s a subplot of Ira’s roommates giving him a hard time for recently losing weight so he can’t be a good stand-up without being fat. There’s another subplot about the roommates were also asked to write jokes for George, but Ira never passed that information along to them. Yet, another plot about Ira wanting to date a stand-up comedienne, but she slept with one of his semi-famous roommates who makes a Head of the Class type tv show so he doesn’t know how to deal with that. Basically, there could have been a whole other movie about just Ira and his friends, but the little bits and pieces we see are crammed into a really busy movie.

Even without those subplots, the main storyline could have still used some editing. I felt like the movie was about to wrap up when it got to the part where George realized he was going to live, but that was only half the movie. Then so much happened when he started to spend time with Laura and met her husband. That part could have been a movie on its own too. I did enjoy the mix of drama and comedy. I really liked Leslie Mann and Eric Bana, who played her husband, but they came so late into the movie. I think with some tightening up, this movie could have been so much better, but you can feel its length while watching it, which isn’t desirable. I want to lose myself in a movie and it was hard to do with this one.

Rating: C+

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