MOVIE REVIEW – Judd Apatow wanted to make a parody of a bad movie, but it turned out almost as bad as the movie was about. The 40-year-old virgin director’s idiotic and clunky meta-film The Bubble, which was filmed during COVID and attempted to comically portray the frustrations of COVID through the making of a movie, mostly just reminds us of how miserable we were when we were locked up.

The COVID-19 epidemic is taking its toll on everyone, not least on director Judd Apatow. Among the many victims was his latest film, The King of Staten Island, which was due to open the SXSW film festival but had to cancel after a shutdown took effect in America. When faced with such challenges, creative people create. Some have baked bread, others have grown beards, and Judd Apatow has made a terrible comedy film. In ‘The Bubble’, a group of insufferable Hollywood actors quarantine themselves on the set of a massively disjointed franchise film and drive each other mad. Sadly, they do the same to us with their lame jokes, completely unlifelike scenes and implausible characters.

A little late with this film

In the early days of COVID, people were in desperate need of a distraction, and Netflix was the logical place for Apatow to give them one, as audiences were turning to stream while theatres were in the dark. If The Bubble had been released a year earlier, when we were still relatively isolated and looking for something to make us laugh, it might have been as welcome a “vaccine” (in both senses of the word…) as the AstraZeneca vaccine (and far less likely to cause blood clots). But The Bubble arrived late, and many of the jokes serve mainly to remind us how irritating and sometimes illogical certain protocols were. The idea of bubbles made sense in theory, but it was only as safe as its weakest link – many people got COVID at one time or another when someone broke the rules for selfish reasons.

Dense “humour”

For the film, Apatow has assembled a bunch of hilarious people – his wife Leslie Mann, daughter Iris Apatow, Emmy winner Keegan-Michael Key, Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova, David Duchovny, Fred Armisen and many more – and cast them as the other cast members who will come together to make the sequel to the blockbuster flying dinosaur horror “Cliff Beasts 6”. The film itself, the target of the parody, is like a cross between the recent “Jurassic World” and “Resident Evil” films (both shot in COVID-proof conditions). This in itself is a great idea, as Apatow has been given an enormous opportunity to lampoon the kind of mindless Hollywood mass-market movies that have made adult comedies into an “endangered species”. This is his Tropic Thunder, which has far too many inside jokes and far fewer than mainstream audiences can recognize or identify with.

The idea was not a bad one…

The story of the film is that actress Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), after skipping the previous “Cliff Beasts” film to make the critically derided problem film “Jerusalem Rising 2”, reluctantly agrees to leave her boyfriend for three months and fly to England, where the crew – a constantly bickering and slightly incestuous “surrogate family” who have been together for five episodes – agreed to self-isolate for two weeks before the three-month shoot. A producer named Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) and a pair of COVID supervisors (Samson Kayo and Harry Trevaldwyn) are tasked with keeping an eye on this ragtag bunch. Kate McKinnon appears as a studio manager who checks in from time to time via video chat from remote holiday destinations.

Some of the stars of “Cliff Beasts” have been around in the past. Lauren (Mann) and Dustin (Duchovny) have recently filed for divorce, but chemistry is still simmering between them. In contrast, action star Sean (Key) has just published a bestseller that could be the basis of a cult – an entertaining idea that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Trying to make a joke in an obnoxious and forced way

The film’s biggest problem is how it tries so sweatily to make fun of horrific disaster movies that it ends up being ridiculous itself, as actors on set run on treadmills or hang from wires in front of the green screen as if that’s how such movies are made. Moreover, Fred Armisen, who plays the director in question, is way out of his league, for example, because he is about a quarter of a century too old to be a Jon Watts or Colin Trevorrow parody, but his comic qualities are also severely challenged. To be honest, there is hardly a more boring place in the world than a film set, where people spend most of their time waiting and where scenes are repeated over and over again. But no one wants to see that, which explains why Apatow decided to turn what he describes as “the 23rd biggest action movie franchise” into some amateurish nonsense directed by an incompetent Sundance winner.

This joke bubble is about to burst

The Bubble is a real missed opportunity because a parody about making a joke film is funny by default, but not mixed with COVID in this way, with a lot of bad jokes. It’s a shame because otherwise, the theme was a good idea, just not in such a lousy execution. But now we will have to wait a long time before we can expect a film with a similar theme, only much better.

-BadSector-