Movie Review: 'The Bubble' is a Complete Unfunny Disaster

The Bubble stars Karen Gillan, at the head of an ensemble cast, as a movie star being convinced to return to an action movie franchise she thought that she had left behind. Gillan’s Carol Cobb became a star in the Cliff Beasts franchise and appeared in 4 of the 5 Cliff Beasts films before abandoning the 5th sequel in favor of making a terrible prestige picture where she played a half Israeli, half Palestinian woman at the heart of the middle east crisis. If you can’t see why that’s a problematic role, one look at a picture of Karen Gillan should explain things.

With this movie failing at the box office and nearly destroying her career, Carol is forced to take back her role in Cliff Beasts for Cliff Beasts 6. However, we’re also in the midst of a pandemic which means that Carol will have to spend several weeks in quarantine in a mansion style hotel in the outskirts of London before shooting can begin. Then she will spend several more months inside the bubble, a closed set intended to protect the cast and crew of Cliff Beasts from COVID-19.

Joining Carol in the bubble are Carol’s co-stars including a former married couple, Dustin Mulwray (David Duchovny) and Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann), comic relief guy Howie (Guz Khan), and action star Sean Knox (Keegan). Also in the bubble are new cast members including Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), and a Tik Tok star Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow). There is also a new director for the blockbuster franchise, an indie film guy and former Sundance award winner named Darren Eigen (Fred Armisen).

And, once the cast is introduced, what we get is one of the most insipid Hollywood satires in quite some time. This limp comedic attempt to send up the privilege and ego of movie stars fails completely. Laughs in The Bubble are as rare as water in the desert. This is surprising considering that The Bubble is the first film from writer-director Judd Apatow since The King of Staten Island in 2020. Apatow has been one of my favorite directors since his breakthrough with The 40 Year old Virgin.

This makes the massive failure of The Bubble staggering. It’s as if Apatow has become bitter about working with movie stars and the pandemic and he uses The Bubble to air all of his many grievances. Nothing in The Bubble works, there are no laughs. The Bubble has the professional craftsmanship you would expect from a director as experienced as Judd Apatow but that is the nicest thing I can say about this ugly, bitter mess.

None of the subjects of Apatow’s attempt at satire earn a laugh. The characters are all sad, wretched human beings, scam artists, and basket cases. Everyone, that is, with the exception of Krystal, the character played by Apatow’s daughter. Krystal also never gets gets any laughs but the movie doesn’t go out of its way to humiliate her as it does the rest of the cast, each of whom is made to look like entitled, overpaid fools.

Apatow also takes a weird, bitter aim at the pandemic and lock downs. After an outbreak on the set forces the movie within the movie to shut down, the studio imposes a new lockdown that is enforced by men with guns. When one of the cast goes rogue and tries to escape, the cast member is shot and maimed. The bitter critique is that apparently Apatow thinks pandemic lockdowns are somehow fascist and the comic extreme of that is violence, bloody gross violence that really doesn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the movie.

The Bubble is a mean spirited, unfunny slog, more than 2 hours long and completely laugh free. Apatow has assembled a group of comedy all stars in Gillan, Duchovny, his own wife, Leslie Mann, and Keegan Michael Key and found exactly nothing funny to do with them. It’s shocking how unfunny The Bubble is, how its bitterness courses through the entire 126 minutes of the movie. As a longtime fan of Apatow I am stunned that he could make a movie this unfunny.

The Bubble debuts on Netflix on April 1st. Perhaps Judd Apatow has created this movie as a practical joke. It wouldn’t be a very funny joke but at least he could disown it and we could all pretend this movie never really happened.