Now that I've seen the movie, I couldn't disagree more with the writers and sites painting Funny People as one of the primary ingredients in a bad summer for Universal. These individuals are inventing a story for themselves to perpetuate. It's all bullshit spin designed to drive their ad-views and comment sections. Be prepared for a movie that's 2.5 hours in length that resembles very little in Sandler's repetoire, and you'll be fine.
The movie earns its runtime, even if the pacing slows in the last act. Various armchair directors have cited arbitrary numbers of minutes that "should have been cut," as if editing a movie were based only in numerical metrics. Those recommendations are about as precise as saying "let's drop one out of every 24 frames, sound like a plan?" It felt as if Funny People could have used a few little nips and tucks throughout, but I'd rather err on the side of length than on chopping content. While I enjoyed Funny People a great deal, I'll agree with the haters that it won't be for everyone.
Part of the issue is the length. When confronted with a 146-minute runtime, a number of friends confided that they immediately filed Funny People under "wait for home video." Even two hour runtimes put people off these days. The American public has become accustomed to everything fitting in a nice, neat 100 minutes, and anything that doesn't feels "weird."
The reason people will dislike Funny People is that those who love Adam Sandler for The Waterboy and Billy Madison generally can't stand Reign Over Me or Punch Drunk Love. Likewise, fans of Judd Apatow's previous movies won't immediately know what to do with this movie, which is a more mature, evolved thing than 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up. No matter what you do, some people will turn up their noses at a filet when they asked for a fatty cheeseburger. They don't want to savor anything, just give 'em something that goes in and then goes right back out.
The loud-breathing kid sitting next to me two nights ago who couldn't stop saying "woooow" and "duuuude" is the manifestation of this confusion. He's one of these guys who are not interested in growing and bettering themselves, but rather, would much prefer to be wealthy and famous for no good reason and get laid all the time. He may have a wonderful personality, but there is no chance in hell this kid ever gets laid. I'll call him DudeWhoa.
DudeWhoa and many like him are assuming that, since Funny People stars Sandler and is about comedians, that he's going to get a hybrid of a Dane Cook standup special and Billy Madison: The Later Years. He came expecting to repeat-quote his way through the movie, but it's impossible to do that with Funny People. Aziz Ansari's Randy is extremely authentic to the quotable-but-worthless comics this kid's generation loves. I've gritted my teeth on open mic nights I've both participated in while watching these morons perform. Ansari has undoubtedly endured this as well, because in his short presence, he embodies everything about hack comics that I want someone to choke out of them.
The context added by a simple "people actually like this stuff?" from Seth Rogen's Ira made it difficult for DudeWhoa to laugh at Randy and not set off a signal that he's an idiot. I could hear it in his grunting though: he really badly wanted to lose it laughing at Randy's killer jokes!
After a while, DudeWhoa seemed to go on the offensive, blurting out "laaaame" and "psh yeah, profound...whatever dude." Even after I told him (I didn't ask) "how 'bout you shut the fuck up," he kept dramatically exhaling like he was stuck at Macy's waiting for his mom to try on jeans.
His final thoughts on the movie as the credits rolled was a simple "Duuuude what the fuck, I mean seriously." That was the end of the sentence. He sat there for a couple more minutes and then exited, talking loudly the whole way out the door.