Usually, you get to see reviewers flex their writing chops when especially terrible films have the misfortune of landing on their plates. As disappointed as they are by the terribleness of these films, one can’t help but feel that reviewers also get a perverse pleasure out of blasting them to smithereens. The Bubble, for good or bad, has turned out to be one of those uniquely terrible films. If you’re thinking it might be bad enough to venture into ‘so bad it’s good’ territory like The Room, prepare to be disappointed. This is just plain bad and plain unfunny.
Inspired by the real story of Jurassic World Dominion’s eighteen-month production during the pandemic, The Bubble features a star-studded cast of actors returning to the sixth installment of a dinosaur-themed franchise called Cliff Beasts during the beginning of the pandemic. Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), who has been called back to the sequel after she skipped the fifth movie, serves as the main character, though we spend a lot of time with most of the main cast as well. We have method actor Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), on-again-off-again husband and wife Dustin (David Duchovny), and Lauren (Leslie Mann), self-help guru/cult leader Sean (Keegan Michael-Key), Tiktok star Krystal (Iris Apatow) and the foul-mouthed Howie (Guz Khan). There are also side characters such as the director Darren (Fred Armisen), producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz), and receptionist Anika (Maria Bakalova). All of them settle in at the Bubble, and the hotel and movie that are set up in isolation to prevent the cast and crew from catching COVID.
This is, without a doubt, a star-studded cast, so it’s especially concerning that the end product misfires on such a large scale.
The story doesn’t have legs, using humor barely large enough to fill Tiktoks to fill a two-hour movie. Instead of mining the premise to do some truly off-the-wall antics, Apatow seemingly lets his cast improvise for the most part. There are some sequences that are ridiculous on paper, such as one of the actors getting her hand blown apart by a sniper when she tries to escape the hotel, but they fall mostly flat. The characters are barely two-dimensional, let alone three-dimensional, and their personalities don’t extend beyond their one-sentence summaries. The only reasonably funny sequence in this film is one of the dance sequences. That there are more than one of them, tells you just how much fat went untrimmed in this film.
There are plenty of cameos from the likes of Beck, James McAvoy, and John Cena, and these are the only bits that seem to work because they don’t overstay their welcome, although Beck’s appearance quickly becomes unfunny as the scene drags on.
The Bubble is Hollywood’s attempt to poke fun at itself, but it does it in such a way as to put an asterisk in front of the satire exclaiming that these creators, of course, weren’t as ridiculous as the ones being skewered in the film. But this satire is mostly toothless. These actors’ struggles are hardly relatable, and the film doesn’t have anything important to say that we already haven’t heard a million times already over the course of the pandemic.