When Judd Apatow isn’t busy on Twitter yelling about Trump and Republicans, he’s busy writing and directing movies like this. The Bubble is a type of film that is better on paper than it is an execution. Let’s put a bunch of celebrities on a film set and put them in COVID regulations, that will be entertaining right? Right?
Netflix is already known as a streaming platform where creativity goes to die and The Bubble is no different than any other movie on Netflix that you have already seen. The film stars Guardians of the Galaxy actress Karen Gillian as a struggling actress named Carol Cobb, who’s dealing with the perils of her failing career. She decides to join the cast of a very popular fictional series called Cliff Beasts 6. However, due the covid-19 restrictions, she and the rest of her castmates are forced to quarantine for two weeks before the filming of the movie and they all must say an isolation bubble throughout the course of the filming.
During the course of filming Carol stuck with a colorful cast of characters such as a young Tik-Tok star, a barely functioning sex addict, a couple of Veteran actors who are working through their own while marital problems, and along with three or four close friends from other Productions. When the cast comes together to begin shooting, everything seems like it is going pretty well, that is until COVID regulations start to take over which interrupts filming and starts to slowly drive everyone crazy. The further the film gets delayed, the more the cast sanity gets dried up. Suddenly, filming the movie becomes more of a hostage situation than an attempt to resurrect Carol’s career.
One of the few positives that the film presents is a colorful cast of character actors that are well known to the audience. Pedro Pascal’s in the film playing the veteran actor who struggling with both of sex and drug addiction. Leslie Mann and David Duchovny plays a couple who her been on and off for many many years, and the rest of the cast is forced to deal with their on and off relationship throughout the course of the filming. Fred Armisen is in the film as the Indy director who was hired for the fictional movie. Keegan-Michael Key is also in the movie as a self-help group who slowly loses his mind are the course of the delays. Then of course we have Kate McKinnon who’s basically Kate McKinnon in every single movie she’s ever been in.
The acting in the film is solid to a degree, it’s the writing of the movie that makes everything piss-poor by comparison. Judd Apatow, who hasn’t made a funny movie since Pineapple Express in 2008, is the man to blame for this mess behind the camera. Apatow, who is used to working with Seth Rogen tries to shoehorn a number of Seth Rogen bits into the film that simply do not work with other actors. Your typical drug-related and sex humor simply doesn’t work here. Apatow called in a few favors to get some of his friends to appear in this movie but has absolutely nothing for them by the time they get on set.
Let’s be honest, this is a film that only got made due to a Judd’s influence, but at the same time Judd proves to be the wrong person at the helm of this film. There was a good opportunity here to have a lot of self-aware humor and considering the fact that a lot of people are still dealing with covid regulations in certain countries across the world. This is a film that tries to tell the same joke over and over again for nearly two hours and fails after 20 minutes.
The Bubble is essentially no different than any other film that’s on Netflix. You should skip it if you had the chance.