- Title: The Bubble
- IMDb: link
While I believe it’s possible to make a satire about the struggles of filmmaking during the pandemic, 2022’s The Bubble is not that film. Writer/director Judd Apatow‘s lazy comedy goes for cheap jokes earning few laughs. The premise is simple enough, the cast (Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, and Guz Khan) of one of the world’s biggest action franchises agree to quarantine in an English hotel and make the next film in the franchise while interacting with the film’s crew, the TikTok guest-star (Iris Apatow), hotel staff, and COVID security officer (Harry Trevaldwyn).
The film focuses on actors playing worse actors leading to some abysmal performances across the board. We also get multiple quarantining segments giving the characters opportunities to act like delusional children while being forced to entertain themselves (and certainly not the audience) in isolation (which is still less groanworthy than the group sequences such as dinner and yoga scenes).
Never do we believe this group of people could come together to make even a single popular movie, with on-set sequences being over-the-top in all the wrong ways. Sequences in the hotel are no better. This is a movie where actors vomiting on each other is expected to earn big laughs. Not even Daisy Ridley in a small cameo as the artificial intelligence in a workout program, which the drugged out Perdo Pascal mistakes for being horny, or Gillian hooking up with a football player (so much for quarantining?) who can’t separate her from her movie role, can force you to crack a smile.
The production of the film within a film eventually devolves with the entire group making a jailbreak. The epilogue brings them together as the “wacky” behind-the-scenes antics of the filming in the bubble are released as a documentary somehow earning this group of people rave reviews from the collection of dumpster fire sequences we’ve just watched. As a movie, The Bubble is a dismal failure. As a torture device it may have some value.