Movie Review: The Bubble
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
One day, a great film may be made about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attempts to navigate life amid uncertainty, fear, and stringent precautions. But, this is not that day, and The Bubble is not that film.
The latest offering from Judd Apatow, the Netflix comedy aims to be a satirical look at Hollywood entitlement and the hubristic attempts to deliver a distraction in the midst of a pandemic. But it’s a rare whiff from the director of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin (2005), a weightless, toothless, and formless comedy that struggles to find laughs and meaning over the course of its 126 minutes.
The Bubble concerns the production of a big-budget action spectacular during the pandemic’s earliest days. After quarantining for 14 days, the cast and crew live inside the same British hotel over the course of six months, trying to finish their dinosaur movie while indulging in drugs, hookups, and other shenanigans. This all happens as the studio resorts to ever-more stringent attempts to keep the film on track, including hiring a mercenary with his own army.
It’s not a bad premise, and Apatow has a great cast at his disposal, including Karen Gillan, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, David Duchovny, Kate McKinnon, Fred Armissen, Maria Bakalova, and Rob Delaney. As he often does — and as is probably fitting for a movie filmed in its own quarantine bubble — Apatow enlists his wife, Leslie Mann, and their daughter, Iris. These are very funny people, and Apatow can be a very funny filmmaker; and yet, The Bubble is a tedious mess that struggles and fails to do anything funny with its premise or characters.
Part of the problem is that it’s both too soon and too late for The Bubble to offer any true comedic perspective or insight. After two years of surges, including an entire year spent navigating false starts and stops, gags about masks, swabs, and social distancing simply aren’t funny. Many TV shows and movies have avoided bringing the pandemic into their storylines because audiences don’t want to see a reality they’re trying to escape brought into their entertainment.
Since The Bubble started filming, several TV shows and movies have successfully and safely completed production, and its jokes about iron-fisted safety precautions and the novelty of COVID bubbles feel dated and flat. The film aims for timeliness, yet it was apparently written and filmed too early to weave in any commentary about the social unrest, conspiracy theories or other issues that came later in the pandemic. Instead, it’s full of jokes about how weird it is to shove Q-Tips up noses, which were played out by June 2020.
What’s left is The Bubble’s attempts to satirize Hollywood excess and bad behavior, but Apatow isn’t a satirist by nature. He’s most successful at rooting humor in emotional honesty, finding laughs in people’s flaws and awkwardness. There’s a little of that here, most successfully Kate McKinnon’s extended cameos as a vicious studio executive, or Pascal’s pompous thespian. But Apatow is too affectionate of his actors and characters to give his script any bite, and the film vacillates between scorn for Hollywood elite’s strangeness and sympathy for them, reminding the audience that, hey, movie stars are really just people, too. Either take could work, in theory, but the attempts to both celebrate actors and lampoon Hollywood self-absorption leave the film muddled and lifeless.
It doesn’t help that Apatow gives each of his actors just the barest sketch of a character to play. The film lacks a strong center. Sometimes it’s Gillan’s actress, returning to a franchise she left and navigating a wrecked love life. Other times, it’s the on-and-off relationship between Mann and Duchovny’s characters, who engage in a torrid affair but have a wrecked marriage in their past. Key is brought in as an actor attempting to be a self-help guru but fighting his own insecurities, but the film abandons him for long stretches. There’s the hint of a movie here, and enough potent setups for something funny, but the film constantly feels like a collection of ideas never honed into something coherent, and Apatow’s usual knack for using improv to bring the laughs just results in listlessness.
There are scattered chuckles. Few people play self-absorbed better than Mann, and McKinnon’s ruthlessness is the only time the satire has any fangs (although it’s still just a watered down version of Tom Cruise’s work in Tropic Thunder [2008]). Newcomer Harry Trevaldwyn walks away with the most sustained laughs as the clueless safety coordinator, and there are a few amusing cameos sprinkled throughout. Duchovny is on-point as a gruff Harrison Ford proxy. Key, Pascal, Gillan, and Armissen are all reliably funny, and it’s probably impossible to have them in a film without them delivering some random laughs, even if they’re pushing against a weightless script.
There’s enough for a silly 80-minute movie. But as he often does, Apatow over indulges, and the movie pushes past the two-hour mark, turning into an endurance test. It’s padded out with not one but two TikTok dance sequences, a drug-fueled freakout that is funny in theory but was funnier in Knocked Up (2007), and a dual sex scene, in which one of the participants is Pascal humping his television. Tacked on is also a laborious escape plan, bafflingly unfunny sequences set within the film being made, and an inert subplot involving the clerks at the hotel loving how the constantly extending mess helps pay their bills. It’s not until the end credits that Apatow presents a look at what a different approach to this film could have been, and it’s far funnier than anything in the preceding two hours.
Apatow is one of the great comic filmmakers. Both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up are among the funniest films of the last two decades, and he’s done more for the current landscape of comedy on TV and in the movies than anyone else. He’s made great films. He’ll make great films again. But The Bubble is an idea that probably would have been best kept in his quarantine journal.
