Bullets over my cold dead body, shot by a clown named Allen

Okay let's be clear and face it: this movie is definitely appreciated by the critics (Roger Ebert, Rotten Tomatoes, Douban, only Senscritique gives it a not excellent but okey score that is 7.0). But I have very much disliked the movie, so my opinion is clearly different from a majority of reviewers in this matter. I would rate it 2/5 based on enjoyment, and 3/5 based on a more objective POV (I mean, the movie is not BAD, it's just that I don't approve & appreciate most of it).
Alright, so this is out of the way. Let's get to work.

There are various forms of creations. Creation can be observed, considered, reflected upon from very different angles & POVs. Here is one, in which time & chronology play an important role: there are CONSTRUCTION, COPYING, DECONSTRUCTION and RECONSTRUCTION works.
The hardest of all, and the most VALUABLE (in a Nietzschean sense), is the reconstruction. The easiest, most obviously, is copying. An example of reconstruction is Boogie Nights: why the "re" of reconstruction? Because Paul 安德生 took characters that were already falling in many clichey categories (the movie director, the porn actors, the party & drugged hippy people...etc), as well as themes that had already matured (porn) and started working on them freshly, from scratch for rebuilding them, and giving to these characters & themes a depth that was not explored previously. Cheap deconstructions & parodies of hippies & party-people are not lacking. Their clicheys & representations (not necessarily faithful to reality) are by the thousands. But it's harder to take these types of personality, behaviours, values and to make something out of them, to give them enough credibility and flesh which they lost because of too many deconstructions. That would be Reconstruction. Any example of copying would simply be any average Hollywood movie nowadays (it's 2015 btw), so it includes pretty much every overly edited action movie (Michael Bay style), every horror film playing more on jump-scares than real creepy atmospheres & strange world building, every romance which denouement is the man apologizing to his forgiving soulmate after sinning & being a jerk outside the couple... and so on. Copycrap is everywhere.

The movie that we are talking about is a DECONSTRUCTION. Deconstructions are double-edged swords: if they give credit where it's due to whatever subject they are taking on (e.g. The Princess Bride), if they change conventions of a genre by putting in smart & original ideas that trigger surprise, freshness & reflection on these (e.g. Aeon Flux) - or in many other cases, the deconstruction can be a delight. However, if the deconstruction tackles more than it can chew (e.g. Midnight in Paris, with all these artists showing up just to get laughed at), or if it impoverishes the original ideas and constructions, then if fails at its aim. I am going to give the basic idea here to illustrate my point: there are great men who have brought something big to this world & whose names are going to live forever with History. These men are usually portraited in a very positive way, stressing their qualities, achievements and their impact on society. A deconstruction would take Freud, Socrates or Descartes, and show them taking a shit on the toilets, saying stupid things (maybe what they are criticizing themselves in their works, for conveying irony) or behaving in an odd & quirky way. The phenomenons described might not be entirely artificial, and therefore no one could deny these facts, but the point is it does not have any VALUE. Yes you are being original at deconstructing great figures by showing their more "human" and not-so-great side, but you are in the end only making something shallow and little out of something that was initially great, or at least inspiring. In this case, the deconstruction becomes PRETENTIOUS, because it claims at dealing with something that it doesn't even reach in the first place.
This is essentially the problem that I have with Bullets in Broadway. The mafia, the theater world & industry (including what happens behind the curtains – in both senses of the expression), the personality of actors (including megalomania, the relationships between them and the director or between fellow actors) etc... are all complicated, entertwined, deep subjects. If one wants to make a deconstruction, the first error would be to mix so much themes and so diverse topics, which is done here.

Bullets over Broadway covers two forms of humor. One works fine, while the other fails hard. The one that works is the humorous idea/concept, the fact that the main theme and overall story is funny, i.e. it is odd, interesting & quite entertaining. The one that doesn't is the concrete & practical humor of each scene: how much the movie is ACTUALLY funny, by making the audience laugh and gets bursts of joyful mood at watching. As a matter of fact, a couple of jokes / punchlines who were supposed to make you LOL (laugh at loud) at hearing them didn't score at all, one that I remember is "the world opening up... like a vagina!", very lame indeed...
A lot of scenes were too surreal, and with too much incoherence. Typically when the director and his manager go meet with the bad actress and their patron: the dialogue and the whole situation are neither funny nor credible. A bit something is just completely off... The mafioso talking on the phone and threatening people was ridiculous, and definitely not how a real gangster works & behave in front of other people, especially if he has some business with them. In the Godfather or in the Goodfellas' and many other gangster movies, they try to keep civilians away from their world as much as possible, never letting know who they are ("I'm in the construction business")...etc. The scene and bad character writing would have been excused if it was at least funny, which it wasn't.
The characters in the movie were not consistent & coherent: the genius artist could not at the same time be a stupid & violent gorilla and someone sensitive & artistic enough for giving birth to a theater masterpiece. The bad actress could not be THAT bad and still getting fair reviews from the critics, as well as being accepted from the other actors who are supposed to be very picky and self-inflated egos. The MC's future wife could not be at the same time loving, caring & supporting at all times as they showed her AND cheating on him with a fat ugly guy (but screaming the MC's name when having sex).
All this can be of course excused by most with a single word: "humor", but as long as there is a story going on, that there is character development (some were done right: the megalomanian actress, the fat ugly artist who failed as a commercial success, the main character himself etc...) it has to be judged by consistency as well. Consistency could have been done with a humorous tone, these notions are not incompatible. In the Princess Bride, even if two characters went from villain to good guys, they were drawn from the beginning in order to keep the coherence of their personality, so it's definitely possible to have a solid script AND humor.
The themes of the movie are super interesting but they have all been ruined (the artist & mafia relationship was better in the Godfather ; the megalo actress was much better in Dear Mommy, the problems of boulimia were treated unfairly & in a ridiculous way - eating pork ribs before sex, anyone? - the mafia shady business & deeds...etc).
There was a huge gap between the oddly joyful & laughable characters (the actress with the dog was super cool, the binge eater) + the softened & ironic drama of the theater world (the director getting angry and saying that he's quitting all the time when a little problem pops up, the melodrama performances that the main actress pulls off even IRL, having to deal with gangsters & stupid actresses etc...) AND the mafia violent scenes and language. It just doesn't work... it's either every problem is an excuse for jokes & bizarre situations for making the audience feel good OR it's a serious scene in which people (involving both the shadow world and normal passengers) get executed because life is hard and unfair. Dealing with these two types of emotions (the morbid & the joyful), and actually going back and forth between the two seemed a wrong direction ("réalisation") orientation. A movie like "Wag the Dog" took this type of black humor and made something great out of it, but it's not the case here. I think they should have kept the whole movie lighthearted and easy watching. None of that crap with executions and violent language: this part (the mafia not being a sweet organization) could have been carried out with more subtlety.
The ending is cheezy and unbelievable as fuck. The hungry director & screenwriter suddenly drops the main theme of the movie (theater) and flips it up to a romcom denouement? The scene from the window, with the future husband begging for his wife to come back is a such a bad taste clichey. Worthy of Woody Allen... The fact that they decide at the peak of their crisis (well, catching your wife fucking your best friend should be some shock) to marry and to forget everything about theater is ridiculous. Not only that (in which case only the specific scene could be criticized), but it's like betraying the main theme and orientation of the whole movie. It starts at the stage of a theater, so it has to end there. The girlfriend / future wife was not even an important character in the movie... her romance with the MC is meaningless in terms of importance to the movie – until the last 10 minutes or so. By betraying the main theme of the movie, Woody Allen also betrays the public. And it's even more serious that the ending is really bad, it's a stupid & cheezy idea AND it does not wrap up anything (what do the other actors become? We were supposed to care about them too!).
The actors have done a great job, only they are saving the day.

The bottom line is that there is no realism or coherence in the movie, and this absence of realism is unfortunately not traded for awesome humor. It's just a messy & out-of-place scenario, in which almost nothing connects. But still entertaining as long as you don't think twice about anything & do not expect any additional layer.