It’s Judd Apatow’s seventh feature film. It feels like he’s directed more, probably because he’s written and produced so many more. But with Apatow at the helm, we should know what to expect by now; a high-quality blend of drama and comedy that’ll probably go on for 20-minutes too long. The Bubble came out on Netflix on April 1st, which is appropriate marketing, because judging by the trailer, I’ve never seen content that could be considered more an April Fool’s joke than this. This could go anywhere.
Somewhere outside London, an American film studio has set up a COVID-safe quarantine bubble, so that they can get production started on the next instalment of a waning franchise, Cliff Beasts 6. Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan) was a mainstay of the series in the early days, but missed the last one, chasing an ill-fated career stretch in more serious roles, and finds herself returning back to the films that made her. The rest of the cast consists of Dustin Mulray (David Duchovny) and Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann), an indulgent divorced couple who once fell in love on the set, Sean Knox (Keegan-Michael Key), who’s deeply into his own spirituality, Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), who’s self-absorbed unless it comes to sex, TikTok star Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow), added to the movie to capture her fanbase, and Howie Frangopolous (Gus Khan), used in these movies for comic relief. The Bubble accounts for the stresses and tribulations of trying to shoot a movie during a reign of COVID, and the wacky nonsense that these Hollywood people demand.
This is a concept with endless possibilities, but The Bubble never stops feeling like an imitation of Tropic Thunder, with COVID shenanigans thrown in. Plus, it’s a bit of a victim of timing, after the conceitedness on display at the Oscars, with Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, it’s not the best moment for a movie that wants to point the finger at the movie industry, and have us laugh along with it. So what results, is a bland hodgepodge of same-same, that rarely jumps out of first gear, until perhaps, the last twenty minutes. The movie closes with a clip of the director character, Darren Eigan (Fred Armisen), talking about how all he wanted to do was to make ‘a distraction in these difficult times’ and ‘as long as the ending is strong’ then that’s fine, because that’s all most audiences will remember anyway; well, if that’s supposed to echo the sentiments of Judd Apatow, then the ending is certainly the strongest part, but that’s not going to stop me from assessing the hour and a half that came before it accordingly, meandering around from scene to scene, and rarely building towards anything exciting. The movie’s characters are mostly uninteresting, and in the quest for them all to be quirky, they end up being the same. The Bubble opens with the producers telling the medical officers rather sternly, that they shouldn’t befriend the actors, and that they won’t want to anyway, because all actors are self-centred animal-freaks; but then the movie’s producers, director, medical staff, and hotel operators all turn out to be just as crazy for cocoa-puffs, so there’s no separation, no opposition, and nobody for us to latch onto. Ultimately, the movie does end up having the actors be the heroes, or at least the group that we’re meant to feel sympathetic towards, due to the nature of this terrible shoot.
Positives – Maria Bambord has a joyful short cameo as Krystal’s Mum. I’m also glad that Maria Bakalova is getting more work in Hollywood since appearing in Borat’s Subsequent Moviefilm, where she starred and won a few awards, and she plays a hotel receptionist here. Fred Armisen seems to embrace his opportunity with a substantial role in a big movie; his director character seems a fairly well-constructed parody, and Eigan even takes part in the only scene of the movie I can pass for really clever irony; and that is, justifying having Carol piss herself under the guise of realism, just after we’ve had a scene with a baby cliff beast dancing 😉 I will also say that the Cliff Beasts series does seem like a gratifying parody, skewering Jurassic Park, and a myriad of other bombastic action franchises – the green screen scenes are pretty interesting alone, showing disastrous takes with the CGI put in, only because I’ve never seen anything like them before. Are they enough for me to urge someone to watch this movie though? No. Harry Trevaldwyn’s performance as the primary COVID safety officer is unusual enough to be interesting too – he makes expressions that remind me of Vanessa Bayer, for whatever that’s worth. And embarrassing as it may seem, I genuinely concluded that Iris Apatow was actually Madeline Zima for the entire movie, and I was bound to say how much I loved Zima embracing her character, as my favourite part of the movie 🥴 But since I haven’t seen Iris Apatow in many other things, maybe she’s as flat as the rest of the cast, and going through the motions; I don’t know. Apatow and Zima look very similar though, right? If only Iris is a little younger and possibly shorter.
This is the first movie I’ve seen to make comment on COVID, despite there being others out there, but I found it either too soon, or not strong enough to be entertaining; probably the latter. It feels like it’s testing the waters for interesting takes, but I’ve heard it said that social media really has had a massive upper hand in delivering content on life with COVID, and current issues, because it can be near instantaneous, and there’s a lot of clever people out there. But on the premise and mere commentary, I think The Bubble makes Don’t Look Up look even better – for as erratic and aggressively poignant as that movie may be, at least it has a point; I struggle to label a clear angle from The Bubble, if anything. There are a lot of famous faces dropping in and out of The Bubble, and I think I was actively annoyed by the time the cameos came from John Lithgow and John Cena, because I realised that this movie seemed set on producing cheap throw-away jokes, instead of focusing in on something interesting, and I gave up. And it devolves into nonsense when Leslie Mann gets her hand blown off. But at least I learnt she can skate; that’s cool. For all The Bubble has to offer, it’s really forgettable. More squeak than substance.
2.0
Leave a Reply