'The Bubble' review: An overboiled pandemic flick nobody asked for

Judd Apatow returns with a chaotic mess of a film which leans heavily on pandemic jokes and half-baked TikTok routines.

Upon seeing the trailer for 'The Bubble', I was, at first, quite excited to see the huge ensemble cast on screen as actors forced into a months-long quarantine to film a hit movie.

The impressive cast play a group of actors shooting the sixth instalment of a multi-million franchise called 'Cliff Beasts' in England during the height of the pandemic.

Among them are grizzled and aging star Dustin (David Duchovny), reluctant returnee Carol (Karen Gillen), TikTok superstar Krystal (Iris Apatow), queen diva Lauren (Leslie Mann), the comic relief Howie (Guz Khan), potential cult-leader Sean (Keegan-Michael Key) and unhinged actor stereotype Dieter (Pedro Pascal).

Directing them is Darren Elgen, an eccentric wannabe auteur played by Fred Armisen. Elgen answers to his producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) who answers to Kate McKinnon's country-hopping studio head Paula.

Exhausted and frustrated from isolation, the cast and crew start to turn on one another. But they eventually begin to realise that they are being forced to stay against their will until the movie is complete.

Bringing up the rear of the big-name casting sheet are English comedian Khan, Harry Trevaldwyn, Katarina Balakova and Vir Das. Most of the laughs come from this part of the billing, with Trevaldwyn's under-trained and anxiously affable assistant Gunther standing out among all.

The main flaw of 'The Bubble' is really its basic premise, which isn't a good start. You see, we're two years into a pandemic with another flare-up happening as I write this. And people are really tired of hearing about it. Like, really tired. Pandemic jokes are such low-hanging fruit at this point that half of it has rotted off onto the ground and got the squirrels drunk.

And, unfortunately, there are a lot of pandemic jokes here. Montages of the actors getting a PCR test? You bet. Two-week isolation montages? Two of them! Why are there so many meaningless montages? I genuinely don't know, but there's at least four.

Some laughs come from Pascal and Mann's natural comic-timing, Duchovny's dry delivery and Key's general likeability factor but it's mostly a case of throwing enough big names at a wall and some of them will come out with a well-delivered joke.

Speaking of big names, a stupid amount of cameos make their way into the film throughout its unnecessary 126 minute run-time, adding little to the plot and clearly coming from actors who were either in isolation themselves or just so happened to be at the film studio at the same time.

TikTok is also for some reason crammed into the script within an inch of its life. It does, however, lead to probably the funniest part of the whole film where social media star Krystal teaches a TikTok dance to a dinosaur. This, along with some other scenes which are so utterly ridiculous that you have to laugh, remind you of the quality Apatow can produce in his films.

Ultimately, the social media app is really just used for half-baked dance montages throughout the flick. The ones reminiscent of social media stars getting their unwilling parents to feature in their videos.

So, it begs the question of who is this comedy actually for? No joke you make about the pandemic is ever going to come across as novel if its all we've been hearing for two years straight. Jokes about actors trying to save us during it all are even more ham-fisted, you may as well have cast Gal Gadot in the main role. In fact, that probably would have worked quite well.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Apatow talked about making a pandemic-themed movie saying, "if I do it, I’ll do it 100%. Be dumb enough to try. Maybe I’ve done something people enjoy or maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake."

Some people may enjoy this movie. I enjoyed some of it. But 'The Bubble' just feels like something written during a very specific time period, for that very specific time period. And now, coming into the middle of 2022, it's just not a movie we need.

'The Bubble' releases on Netflix this Friday, April 1.