La Bulle

Alright, let me break your bubble here.. I usually enjoy Judd Apatow's low-brow comedies, but this one reminds us of everything we hated about the early stages of the pandemic with added celebrity commentary. The humor didn't land for me most of the time, and even with a spectacular cast, the film never hits the highs you expect. It just gets by with a meandering screenplay that neither engages nor makes us root for any of its whiny, privileged characters. Well, Apatow's trying otherwise - he wants us to laugh at (and not with) everyone in the film industry dominated by corporate giants and larger-than-life characters. The pandemic was a bad phase, and no films needed to be made around that subject. Some fleeting flourishes aside (mostly from Pedro Pascal and a few cameos), The Bubble is honestly a letdown!

Well let me be the guy that found The Bubble to be funny. After reading the first page of reviews on here and looking at the poor ratings it gets I'm glad I had a different experience with this comedy. There are a lot of funny scenes, absurd sometimes but does everything has to be that serious all the time? They clearly made more than once fun of the pandemic and that was also nice to see there are still people that are not completely paranoid or just don't give a toss about the whole brainwashing we got. Plus the cast was very well chosen for this movie. I liked almost everybody if not everybody. They all did a good job, added something different to the story, and were all funny. I don't know if I have better weed than anybody else but I had a good time, and so did my wife who never has weed.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good joke. I just don't love the same joke being repeated over and over for two hours. There's plenty to mock over the past couple of years and I applaud this movie for having a go but it would've been much better if someone who actually understood comedy had written this, like Ricky Gervais or the Monty python crowd. But no. In typical Netflix fashion we get a corporate confection of mediocrity.

A group of so-so actors who have made the dinosaur franchise 'Cliff Beasts' come to a lavish English hotel to make the sixth mostly green screen instalment whilst locked down from COVID. The studio take extreme steps to keep them filming come what may whilst the cast go slowly mad.

Whilst there is much to dislike here - lots of characteristic Apatow shouting and waffling interminable rubbish that means nothing, I kinda liked this. It's a good cast with stand out comic performances for me by David Duchovny, Pedro Pascal and the ever wonderful Peter Serafinowicz. In addition if you listen and watch carefully enough there are some scenes and off the cuff remarks that lean more towards the biting satire on actors, current film audiences and Hollywood that this needed to be and at those times this is genuinely funny. You need to be tolerant around the piles of rubbish, but in the right mood this is a sweet and quite fun movie.

Premise had a lot of potential. The cast are talented. The film is just not very good. It's poorly paced and the gags are flat. Could've been great with a rewrite that included actual jokes and slicker dialogue.

Not a good film by any measure.