Locked Up
Whatever your mileage is with comedy director Judd Apatow, the comedies he made in the mid to late 2000s shaped a decade of what funny movies were shaped like. The ones that were shaped like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up were even pretty good most of the time. It wasn't until his 2012 film This is 40 that the wheels really fell off and his schtick became threadbare, exposing the fact that his predilection for letting actors improvise their ways out of scenes led to enormously bloated run times where comedy asphyxiates and died while paying audiences looked on in goggle-eyed terror. Perhaps this was foolishness speaking, but I thought if any movie could drag him away from that method, it was The Bubble.
The Bubble has a script and a cast that wouldn't be served by the typical Apatow treatment. First, the story is more high concept and features more structured gags than "adult needs to learn to be less than a child while hanging out with various people." Namely, this film follows the cast and crew of the action flick Cliff Beasts 6 as they deal with the challenges of filming in a pandemic bubble in late 2020.
The ensemble is massive, but the most prominent figures are Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), who is returning to the franchise after ditching out on part 5 to pursue other (failed) projects, Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), who is either supposed to be a Joaquin Phoenix-style "annoying but respected actor" or a burnout depending on the needs of the scene, Sean Knox (Keegan Michael-Key), who is trying and clearly failing to implement the self help teachings of his recent bestselling nonfiction book, Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow), a TikTok star making her acting debut, Darren Eigan (Fred Armisen), a director who is either a pretentious Sundance brat or a work for hire shill depending on the needs of the scene, and former married couple Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann) and Dustin Mulray (David Duchovny), who alternately argue and fuck while he tries to rewrite the entire script from under the director. I'm going to stop there, because this paragraph is long enough as it is, but I haven't even mentioned the four prominent hotel staff members (one of which is played by Borat 2's Maria Bakalova), about a dozen other recurring speaking characters, and another bucketful of cameos and bit parts.
Any filmmaker with this concept and group of people on their hands would naturally feel the need to shake off the shagginess that usually accompanies an Apatow joint. Except for Apatow, apparently, who lets the cast mill about and stare at one another as the film slowly bloats to a run time of just barely under two hours (with credits, the film clocks in at 126 godforsaken minutes). Plainly put, The Bubble is a screeching disaster, and the final entertaining or interesting scene is already long over by the time the film hits its halfway point.
The first act at least features scenes that are recognizable as comic setups, sometimes delivering Tropic Thunder-esque satire of modern Hollywood, sometimes delivering the same bare minimum pandemic jokes about shaking hands and nose swabs that you've heard your uncle say 800 times by now. This is also the place where the - admittedly very talented - cast has the opportunity to shine. Everyone here is pretty much delivering the exact performance you would expect, with Duchovny in the lead, throwing himself full force into playing a cartoonishly self-serious asshole. The only person who isn't delivering is Guz Khan, whose character starts at "grating" and slowly rises toward "insufferable" over his ample screen time.
Unfortunately, any glimmer of promise that this cast exhibits is drowned by the interminable second act, which fails to find a foothold in any semblance of a plot and instead drowns the pacing with no fewer than three dance sequences and an unmotivated and boring "let's stop dead and take drugs for 15 minutes" bit of Apatowian debauchery. The rushed third act then flings itself randomly into the realm of action-comedy, which is even worse served by the aesthetic mode of the film, seemingly ending before dragging you back in, kicking and screaming, into a coda that repeats all the gags from the first act of the film in quick succession.
After about half an hour, The Bubble forgets that punchlines exist and assumes that you will have fun if you are watching people on screen have fun, which is patently not the case when every scene goes on too long by a factor that ranges between ten seconds and five minutes. Any further scenes that show potential of being humorous are swiftly executed by liberal application of characters hanging a hat on every joke by pointing out exactly how it's supposed to be funny, sometimes multiple times over.
There is also no consistency. Of tone, of character, of anything. Even after the halfway point, the film is still introducing new locations and characters despite the fact that the film is all about claustrophobia and should be highlighting that by hammering in the limited scope of the world around the main cast. I will give The Bubble this: it is a film about people being trapped in a single location, and it is very good at making you feel like there is no escape as you feel hours from your life slipping between your fingers, just like someone in quarantine might feel. So form is serving function in that way, at the goddamn absolute least.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The Bubble has a script and a cast that wouldn't be served by the typical Apatow treatment. First, the story is more high concept and features more structured gags than "adult needs to learn to be less than a child while hanging out with various people." Namely, this film follows the cast and crew of the action flick Cliff Beasts 6 as they deal with the challenges of filming in a pandemic bubble in late 2020.
The ensemble is massive, but the most prominent figures are Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), who is returning to the franchise after ditching out on part 5 to pursue other (failed) projects, Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), who is either supposed to be a Joaquin Phoenix-style "annoying but respected actor" or a burnout depending on the needs of the scene, Sean Knox (Keegan Michael-Key), who is trying and clearly failing to implement the self help teachings of his recent bestselling nonfiction book, Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow), a TikTok star making her acting debut, Darren Eigan (Fred Armisen), a director who is either a pretentious Sundance brat or a work for hire shill depending on the needs of the scene, and former married couple Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann) and Dustin Mulray (David Duchovny), who alternately argue and fuck while he tries to rewrite the entire script from under the director. I'm going to stop there, because this paragraph is long enough as it is, but I haven't even mentioned the four prominent hotel staff members (one of which is played by Borat 2's Maria Bakalova), about a dozen other recurring speaking characters, and another bucketful of cameos and bit parts.
Any filmmaker with this concept and group of people on their hands would naturally feel the need to shake off the shagginess that usually accompanies an Apatow joint. Except for Apatow, apparently, who lets the cast mill about and stare at one another as the film slowly bloats to a run time of just barely under two hours (with credits, the film clocks in at 126 godforsaken minutes). Plainly put, The Bubble is a screeching disaster, and the final entertaining or interesting scene is already long over by the time the film hits its halfway point.
The first act at least features scenes that are recognizable as comic setups, sometimes delivering Tropic Thunder-esque satire of modern Hollywood, sometimes delivering the same bare minimum pandemic jokes about shaking hands and nose swabs that you've heard your uncle say 800 times by now. This is also the place where the - admittedly very talented - cast has the opportunity to shine. Everyone here is pretty much delivering the exact performance you would expect, with Duchovny in the lead, throwing himself full force into playing a cartoonishly self-serious asshole. The only person who isn't delivering is Guz Khan, whose character starts at "grating" and slowly rises toward "insufferable" over his ample screen time.
Unfortunately, any glimmer of promise that this cast exhibits is drowned by the interminable second act, which fails to find a foothold in any semblance of a plot and instead drowns the pacing with no fewer than three dance sequences and an unmotivated and boring "let's stop dead and take drugs for 15 minutes" bit of Apatowian debauchery. The rushed third act then flings itself randomly into the realm of action-comedy, which is even worse served by the aesthetic mode of the film, seemingly ending before dragging you back in, kicking and screaming, into a coda that repeats all the gags from the first act of the film in quick succession.
After about half an hour, The Bubble forgets that punchlines exist and assumes that you will have fun if you are watching people on screen have fun, which is patently not the case when every scene goes on too long by a factor that ranges between ten seconds and five minutes. Any further scenes that show potential of being humorous are swiftly executed by liberal application of characters hanging a hat on every joke by pointing out exactly how it's supposed to be funny, sometimes multiple times over.
There is also no consistency. Of tone, of character, of anything. Even after the halfway point, the film is still introducing new locations and characters despite the fact that the film is all about claustrophobia and should be highlighting that by hammering in the limited scope of the world around the main cast. I will give The Bubble this: it is a film about people being trapped in a single location, and it is very good at making you feel like there is no escape as you feel hours from your life slipping between your fingers, just like someone in quarantine might feel. So form is serving function in that way, at the goddamn absolute least.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: netflix originals
