The Bubble Reviews Bash Judd Apatow's Pandemic Movie
Judd Apatow’s Netflix comedy The Bubble doesn’t live up to standards set by his previous films and is an unfunny satire, according to critics.
Early reviews for Judd Apatow’s meta-comedy The Bubble are trickling in for the film’s April Fool’s Day release on Netflix and it seems like the joke is on Apatow. The film is written and directed by Apatow and has made a name for itself through a variety of stunt marketing campaigns to get The Bubble on audiences' radars. The Bubble follows a star-studded cast and crew trying to make their sci-fi adventure film Cliff Beasts 6: Battle for Everest as they hole up in a studio in London due to an unprecedented global pandemic. The filmmakers are forced to battle boredom, sexual frustration, and the unnamed virus during their secluded quarantine.
Portraying the cast of the film-within-a-film are Karen Gillan, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, Iris Apatow, and Guz Khan, with Fred Armisen portraying the fictional director and Kate McKinnon as the studio head. The satirical film also includes a slew of cameos to look out for including actors John Cena, Daisy Ridley, John Lithgow, James McAvoy, and musician Beck. Director Judd Apatow of This is 40 fame, and most recently the man behind 2020’s The King of Staten Island with Pete Davidson, now has the chance to prove to audiences if his most recent film has the same amount of heart and comedy.
Dropping on Netflix just under a month after the release of the first teaser trailer, The Bubble reviews are in from critics who have all but completely panned the film. The general consensus for criticism is that pandemic humor is already tiresome to audiences, the film feels like a series of comedy sketches loosely tied together, and its star-studded cast can’t save it from its unfunny writing. Check out some of the reviews below:
Leah Greenblatt, EW
In its best moments, The Bubble refracts the familiar boredom of lockdown life, the indoor rollerskating and haphazard sex and TikTok dance routines, just by living in them. Like Adam McKay with Don't Look Up, though, Apatow seems stymied by his soft targets: The usual-suspect jokes — about age, ego, Hollywood — are broad where they should be specific, and smug even when they're not sharp.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.
David Rooney, THR
None of it amounts to more than half-baked sketch ideas in a film that’s staggeringly inept considering the resources involved. The Bubble was meant to be a pandemic lark, a fun antidote to the virus. But it’s a cure for nothing.
Peter Debruge, Variety
This seems like it would’ve been the right way to frame “The Bubble” — not as a semi-improvised scripted comedy but as more of a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary that intercuts between the outrageously unprofessional behavior that occurs on location and talking-head footage of the actors trying to do damage control after the fact. That format feels slightly out of date these days, but then, so do most of the jokes in “The Bubble.”
David Ehrlich, IndieWire
While Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble” isn’t as grating or grandiose as Adam McKay’s apocalyptic “Don’t Look Up,” this star-studded Hollywood caricature is even more unexpectedly depressing. That element of surprise doesn’t work to Apatow’s advantage. It’s not meant to be a compliment when I say that “The Bubble” is depressing in a way that modern comedies rarely are — that it’s depressing in as novel a way as the coronavirus that inspired it.
Luke Y. Thompson, The A.V. Club
Without some grounding in reality, The Bubble plays like a series of Saturday Night Live sketches, in particular Celebrity Jeopardy: The Movie; that said, plenty of moments are genuinely funny, which comes as no surprise given everyone involved.
Nick Harley, Den of Geek
The Bubble is being released after two full years of life during a pandemic; all the observational humor about how uncomfortable swabs are, or how it seems like those in charge of safety mandates are making it up on the fly, have been done to death. While coming at the material as a Hollywood satire is a clever conceit, it simply doesn’t deliver memorable results.
Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe
It’s hard to say why something is funny. The best humor eludes explanation. Brain waves hardly matter for belly laughs. It may be even harder to say why something isn’t funny. This makes reviewing “The Bubble” a challenge.
Gabriella Geisinger, Digital Spy
“The fundamental problem is that the divide The Bubble is pointing out with a neon 'LAUGH NOW' sign is very real and very unfunny. Those with enough money have been able to bend the world to fit their (sometimes very real) anxieties, while the rest of us have to figure it out.”
Jake Cole, Slant Magazine
For a film about studio greed putting workers in potential danger in order to keep the old content mill running, The Bubble ultimately makes a limp and dubious case that any act of creativity, no matter how compromised, brings enough pleasure to viewers to offset the system’s prevailing soullessness.
The early reviews for The Bubble are a far departure from the much more favorable ones for Apatow’s previous film The King of Staten Island, with most critics complaining that the comedy didn’t land for them and the film’s attempt at biting satire is never fully actualized in the film’s two-hour-plus runtime. Currently, The Bubble is sitting with a "rotten" score of 23% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 47 reviews, with the audience score coming in slightly higher at 35%. However, it's a common occurrence for discrepancies to exist between audiences and critics due to the genre’s more subjective nature.
Not every film featuring the pandemic has been a flop, with Steven Soderbergh’s 2022 thriller Kimi becoming a surprise hit, but audiences and critics alike are making it known that "pandemic humor" has overstayed its welcome when it comes to on-screen depictions. The tepid response to Apatow’s comedy also doesn’t bode well for streaming giant Netflix, which was just relishing in the success of Shawn Levy’s original sci-fi film The Adam Project. But failure hasn’t stopped Netflix in the past and the response to The Bubble will likely not have a huge effect on Netflix’s grand plans for the future of original content.
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