The Bubble (2022).......serves as writer-director Judd Apatow's gargantuan raised middle finger to a Hollywood industry now devoted solely to pumping out soulless, mindless CGI franchise sludge to clog up theater chains much in the same way cholesterol blocks arteries.
And who knows.....at a swift, sharp 80 to 85 minutes, this satire of all the current standard Hollywood tropes and stereotypes, might've come out as a fast 'n funny treat......
Nope. That didn't happen.
Instead, at a repetitive, tortuous 126 minutes, Apatow pounds away at the same targets over and over again.......self-absorbed idiot actors, overpraised fatuous directors, rapacious agents and studio bigwigs and the ever omnipresent green screens used to fashion comic-book garbage for the multiplex masses......(most of whom line up to view this landfill in China....).
He's preaching strictly to the choir who follow the rising and falling fortunes of the film industry, but by the time this movie exhausts the last one its 30,000 barbs, even the choir could find themselves yawning.
There is one good idea in play here.....setting the story at the tail end of 2020, where the studio decides to risk making the next installment of their cash cow action-adventure franchise while COVID still rages worldwide. To this end, they establish and enforce a quarantine 'Bubble' in which to make the film.....on the grounds of a luxury hotel housing the cast and crew.
This means all the movie folk, each of them an imbecilic loon of varying degrees are stuck together as the shooting schedule drags on, month after month.
The concept's funny for the first 20 minutes or so.....the idea of the actors, all of them working on their last nerve to begin with,(and very little sanity) succumbing to rising heights of anger, panic and idiocy as the shoot drags on, under its woeful, clueless director (Fred Armison), a film festival geek who won Sundance with film he shot on his IPhone.
But in a case in insular art imitating art, "The Bubble" itself drags on and on right along with the toxic movie it's chronicling - ("Cliff Beasts", an all too typical CGI crapfest, forcing actors to bounce around on wires, pretending to dodge flying dinosaurs..)
Long before Judd Apatow finally fires off his umpteenth gag at the expense of the faux-movie and its increasingly unstable personnel, we found ourselves begging for mercy to escape the endless torment as much as the characters did.
After suffering through excrement like 'Moonfall' and 'The Eternals', we couldn't agree more that the film industry had this coming to it.........but "The Bubble" quickly becomes too much of a slim joke pounded into the ground until it gasps its last breath.
Which leads to a 126 minute comedy that's just not that funny. 1 star (*).
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