“The Bubble” is a rare flop from the tremendously talented Judd Apatow. It’s not a complete dud. There are a handful of laugh-out-loud moments. The plot is too choppy and the final quarter of the movie is plodding and uneven.
It has an all-star cast in the movie about making an action movie, including Karen Gillan, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowiz (so good in “The Tick”) and Maria Bakalova Also Apatow’s lovely and talented wife, Leslie Mann, and one of their daughters, Iris. Plus a whole bunch of cameos. Beck is great as he gives a Zoom musical performance to pep up a dispirited cast. Gillan plays an actor returning to the action franchise after sitting out a movie. Duchovny and Mann play a bickering couple who are again making a sequel. Key plays what seems like a mash up of Kevin Hart and Duane Johnson with a pinch of Tom Cruise cultish behavior thrown in. Iris Apatow plays a social media influencer. There are too many parts to describe them all. They are taken to a hotel in Britain and isolated to make another sequel in a flying dinosaur movie. There’s interaction and conflict between the actors, between the staff taking care of them and with studio bosses. Early on, Pascal has some of the best parts in the movie. By the end his character is just nonsense. Mann has a jarring scene meant to be a joke but it partially derails the movie. Jokes using the special effects green screen were great at first but got repeated too many times. That the plot just falls apart is surprising. Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon said Apatow gave much advice over the years on how to strengthen “The Big Sick” as they wrote it. Maybe Apatow didn’t have the time to take all the knots out of his script. I watched it over several weeks, starting when it first came out. Its IMDB rating when I started was 5.2, but it dropped to 4.7 by the time I finished. It’s better than a 4.7 movie. But it has problems. One of the clearest signs was when Apatow appeared on the “Fly on the Wall” podcast with Dana Carvey and David Spade. Carvey said despite being sent the screener link several times, he couldn’t get it to work so he could watch the movie. Spade mentioned he had seen it. Apatow asked Spade how he liked it and Spade kept talking like he didn’t hear the question. My suspicion is that Carvey either lied about not watching it or knew he didn’t want to watch it and lied about not getting the screener link to work. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAH5J8yxyEu-aFUWFU1MCGk_RHHPg-21gbVFug641D9Z80NVudA%40mail.gmail.com.
