Dir: Judd Apatow. Starring: Karen Gillan, David Duchovny, Leslie Mann, Pedro Pascal, Keegan-Michael Key, Iris Apatow, Gus Khan, Fred Armisen, Peter Serafinowicz, Maria Bakalova, Kate McKinnon. 126 mins.
Can a pandemic be funny? That’s the question posed by Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a Netflix comedy about movie stars shooting a blockbuster during one. It joins a small, mostly undignified array of films that have tried to incorporate our last two years into their plots. Thankfully, The Bubble isn’t as distasteful as Amazon’s “Covid-23” romance Songbird, nor as terrible as the Anne Hathaway heist film Locked Down. Instead, it’s a fleetingly amusing but largely bad movie that just so happens to be about coronavirus. As far as Covid cinema goes, it’s a hit. As a comedy, it’s a disappointment.
