Mark Reviews Movies: THE BUBBLE (2022)

The Bubble, Netflix

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

It's not too difficult to believe that co-writer/director Judd Apatow might lose the plot, the humor, and the purpose of a comedy with as much possibility as the premise of The Bubble. It's much harder to believe that, given the size and general talent of its cast, nobody seems to know or care about what they're doing, either behind the scenes or on the screen of this behind-the-scenes look at what it might take to get a movie on screens during a global pandemic.

The central concept revolves around the doomed attempt to make the sixth installment in a fictional action franchise, about a ragtag group fighting dinosaurs. The obvious issue, of course, is that it's 2020, and with COVID-19 raging and leading to many restrictions, the production has to take place within the bubble of a hotel somewhere in English countryside and a tightly monitored studio.

It's a fine enough start, but the whole affair quickly collapses. Apatow and Pam Brady's screenplay takes so much time establishing its stakes, its wide collection of characters, and the various conflicts within this production and among these players that the story loses any sense of momentum almost immediately.

We first meet Carol (Karen Gillan), who skipped participating the previous entry in the series. To try to get her career back on track (after playing a half-Israeli and half-Palestinian woman who leads both sides in a fight against aliens, which is at least a theoretically amusing gag), she decides to re-join the cast of the next installment.

To understand just how much Apatow and Brady try to cram into this mostly simple and straightforward setup, Carol is hesitant to leave behind her boyfriend (played by Chris Witaske), who suffers from anxiety and has two kids, and over the course of the movie, the beau dumps her for a waitress, who moves into Carol's house with him. None of this is relevant to the story, because it's both a distraction from the conflict on set and brought up in only a couple of scenes, making it a transparent piece of padding.

The other cast members include Dieter (Pedro Pascal, putting on a ridiculous accent while shooting the movie—a punch line without a setup or any kind of context, for that matter), Sean (Keegan-Michael Key), Lauren (Leslie Mann), her ex-husband Dustin (David Duchovny, whose cool detachment is amusing, even if it doesn't actually fit the persnickety character he's playing), and social media star Krystal (Iris Apatow). Dieter desperately wants to have sex, but no one's biting, save for a hotel employee (played by Maria Bakalova) who will only sleep with him if he marries her. Sean runs a self-help program that looks suspiciously like a religion or a cult, and occasionally, the movie remembers that setup.

Meanwhile, Lauren and Dustin rekindle their disastrous romance (They adopted a teenager, who's apparently a sociopath, about two years ago), and Krystal, who's only in the movie because she has a huge online following, choreographs some dances for her social media. If Crystal seems like a character ripe for some satirical point (That the director cast his own daughter in the role—although she is smartly self-aware in the part—almost begs us to consider this possibility), this movie isn't taking the easy bait. Instead, it goes for the easier and far more pointless angle, allowing three dance sequences (One with a digital dinosaur loses the point of how ridiculous it is as a scene in the movie-within-the-movie) to take up more time, divert the story and the comedy yet again, and, generally, add to the momentum-killing bloat.

All of this is just the core of what's going on with the actors of the collapsing production. Beyond them, the story expands to pressured and pressuring producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) and self-important but incompetent director Darren (Fred Armisen). Beyond even them, there are members of the production's health initiative and a far-too-eager security chief (played by Ross Lee), who seems willing to seriously injury or kill the stars, if only to keep the movie on schedule on orders from the studio.

Add in a bunch of cameos of various amounts of screen time but equal levels of insignificance to the story and actual comedic impact, and Apatow's philosophy becomes painfully apparent: Put as much as possible into this material, and assume at least some of it will stick. As a result, The Bubble becomes an overloaded mess that takes one decent idea and keeps splitting it, until we're left with a couple dozen useless ones.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products