By: Alex Tilton

Here’s the moral up front: I need to listen to my prejudices and not watch movies with dubious cover art that suggests they might be ‘clever’ comedies. I have only myself to blame for this. Some spoilers ahead, but it doesn’t matter, because this is only just barely a movie. Here we go…

Sometimes a character in the movie says what the audience is thinking. Our example from ‘The Bubble’ comes to us courtesy of a character who’s name I couldn’t remember with a gun to my head (played by Pablo Pascal): “Listen, I’m sorry, I’m trying to care…but it’s hard.” 

The premise is simple: a bunch of actors are in isolation during COVID while they film a movie and slowly go crazy from the isolation. And because this is a ‘smart comedy’ all of the actors are (naturally) a bunch of infantile, marginally functional, egomaniacal, substance abusing, pampered idiots…because they’re actors.

That’s the joke…That’s the entire joke…For the entire film.

It’s a McNetflix movie about the filming of a McNetflix movie. Isn’t that clever? Netflix is saying, ‘ha ha ha, we get it, we make a lot of crappy by-the-number-films ha ha ha. See we can poke fun at ourselves, ha ha ha. We will make all of our characters and stuff in the movie be the cliches that people are currently mocking because they are stupid and ha ha ha that will be great ha ha ha.”

This is what ‘trying to be cool’ looks like, and it’s godawful. There is no real plot and there is no main character. In fact, there aren’t really any characters. Instead, we have caricatures. Each of them has one personality characteristic which is played up massively. It’s supposed be funny, but instead it’s obnoxious, dull, predictable and grates on the nerves. I got halfway through it before I quit. It’s as though someone tried to stretch a TikTok trend video into a feature film. This theory is supported by the fact that one of the cast members of this movie-within-a-movie is a TikTok dancer who was recruited to bring in her legion of proudly attention-deficient fans. She spends the first half of the movie treating the other cast members like adorably out of touch elderly people. She might get held accountable for this in the second half of the movie but since I have no intention of subjecting myself to any more of this ‘film’ I guess I’ll never know.

It’s worth noting that this film has a shockingly high-end cast including David Duchovny, Leslie Mann, Pedro Pascal, Daisy Ridley, Kate McKinnon, John Lithgow and Karen Gillian. They did the best they could with what they were given, but they were given basically nothing. I’d love to rant about why this movie even got made but the answer is as plain as day. It was a quick, cheap product Netflix could stick in their queue to satisfy their endless need for fresh original content.

I have this horrible fear that someone will whine at me that I’m taking this whole thing the wrong way. That it wasn’t intended to really be a movie in the first place and at 40 years of age I’m too much of an out of touch geezer to appreciate the new style. To that I say, go watch ‘A Mighty Wind’, ‘This is Spinal Tap’, or ‘Best in Show.’ Mockumentaries can be amazing. There’s nothing wrong with the basic idea, this one just happened to be pathetically unfunny. It’s not quite as bad as an Adam Sandler film, but it’s close. And that’s the harshest critique I know.