“We’re being mistreated!”, screams an angry Karen Gillan to her agent, played in a cameo by Rob Delaney.

“Oh, spare me… You’re being actress mistreated. I’m being f#cking human being mistreated. You ever tried to teach a 12-year-old Math? It’s impossible. Ok? He’s been shut in his room, I walked in there the other day and he was watching Japanese Taxi Porn.”

“What is Japanese taxi porn?”, asks a befuddled Gillan

“It’s just what it sounds like. They f#ck the taxi driver, halfway through the video – In Japan!“

This exchange between Gillan and Delaney happens to capture the essence of what Judd Apatow’s The Bubble is about, whilst also being the funniest moment in all the film. I know it is not tremendously hilarious, but it is all downhill from there – and the issue is that it has been a slippery slope up to this moment.

Shot and set during the Covid 19 pandemic, The Bubble is about a group of actors -played by the aforementioned Gillan, David Duchovny, Pedro Pascal, Leslie Mann, Keegan-Michael Key, Guz Khan and Iris Apatow- who get together to shoot Cliff Beasts 6, the latest instalment in a blockbuster saga clearly inspired by the Jurassic Park franchise. The main issue here is that before the actual filming process takes place and in order to avoid being infected by Covid, all the actors have to stay confined in a wonderfully luxurious hotel, taken care by the staff and supervised by the producer and director of the film -played by Peter Serafinovicz and Fred Armisen, respectively-.

The comparison to Jurassic Park is not casual, as it may or may not be that the filming of Jurassic World: Dominion amidst the Covid 19 pandemic inspired this film, co-written by Apatow and Pam Brady. However, as soon as they start shooting Cliff Beasts 6, one of the central weaknesses of The Bubble appears, as the film within the film reaches levels of horribleness proper of things like Sharknado. Yes, I know that one might say that it is played for laughs as Cliff Beasts 6 is trash, which is a direct critique to Hollywood tendency to rely on tentpoles which can be extended to umpteenth sequels -each one worse than the previous-, rebooted, remade or retconned.

Indeed, it is right to say that The Bubble is a satire on Hollywood, its actors and the superficiality of the business in general. However, as satires go this one is as sharp as a sledgehammer, and as aggressive as a sedated Teletubby.

Whilst films like Tropic Thunder, The Player, Bowfinger or -and even to a lesser extent America’s Sweethearts- gingerly march along, cleverly mocking different aspects of Hollywood, The Bubble trudges clumsily, following a thin plot that is soon reduced to a succession of sketches that feel unfunny and disappointingly unoriginal, thus overstating its welcome and not making up for a cohesive film. Had this film been 80-90 minutes long, maybe the concatenation of scenes might have felt slightly less repetitive, but as it clocks in at 2 hours and 6 minutes, The Bubble is so bloated that it feels like a gas, but not in a positive way.

This is not the first time that a film by Apatow feels longer than it should have been -his only projects shorter than two hours are The 40-Year-Old Virgin, some TV episodes and short films he directed over the years-. The problem with The Bubble in relation to some of his other projects is that here there is not a single character with whom you might identify or take a liking to. You spend the runtime of the film surrounded by superficial people with less depth than a spit in the sidewalk – people who share a universe in which you do not belong and certainly you should not want to. Not that any of that might be blamed on the actors, as none of them are particularly bad here, even though they have to go through cringeworthy moments such as a -so-called- funky concert by Beck and a couple of TikTok montages. You know, to be hip with the gen Z.  

I wish I had liked The Bubble, but, being a fan of Judd Apatow, I hate to say that I had more fun watching Moonfall. Too long for its own good, the film cannot hold everything together and ends up feeling like it was rushed and none of the scenes were eliminated in the final edit. Considering the fact that it is nothing more than a compilation of sketches, had this been originally made into a miniseries it would have been perfect, as considering that the film is about 2 hours long, you can almost effortlessly divide it into a six-episode series, with 20-minute episodes.

And the best of that is that if this had been a TV series, I would not have reviewed it, because it is bad. Really bad.