Oh no, this is very bad.
I've enjoyed most of the other Judd Apatow films I've seen, and I really like some of the tv shows he's written for including Freaks and Geeks, Love, and Girls (I know some people hate that last one but I like it, sue me).
In telling the story of a troubled film production occurring during the pandemic, there's potential here, plus a lot of the cast have been funny in other films before. Movies about difficult or unconventional film shoots are often very entertaining, too.... but this won't join the ranks of Ed Wood, Be Kind Rewind, Living In Oblivion, The Disaster Artist, or Dolemite Is My Name; not by a long shot (if The Bubble looks intriguing to you, just watch any of those films instead. They're all much better).
This and a few COVID-era stand up specials (most notably Aziz Ansari's latest middling half-hour special) have shown that to make COVID funny, you have to make something really good, clever, or creative. It's becoming apparent that it's a hard subject to make funny. I don't think it's impossible to laugh at parts of it, but given its so recent and so many of us are still living through it, bad to average COVID-themed humour lands with more of a dull thud than bad to average regular humour.
Plus, it doesn't help that a lot of the jokes here that aren't particularly relevant to the pandemic are pretty toothless and boring. The banter just isn't funny- the semi-improvised sounding types of conversations that were funny in Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up just aren't funny here.
I smiled a little a couple of times, but when your comedy's over a couple of hours long, that's just not enough. I checked the time at one point, thinking I was a over halfway done, and I was less than 40 minutes in. I checked it again when I felt like there was half an hour left, and there was still 65 minutes to go.
It's not good. And it uses a terrible Miley Cyrus cover of Heart of Glass at one point, which was a bit offensive.
I've enjoyed most of the other Judd Apatow films I've seen, and I really like some of the tv shows he's written for including Freaks and Geeks, Love, and Girls (I know some people hate that last one but I like it, sue me).
In telling the story of a troubled film production occurring during the pandemic, there's potential here, plus a lot of the cast have been funny in other films before. Movies about difficult or unconventional film shoots are often very entertaining, too.... but this won't join the ranks of Ed Wood, Be Kind Rewind, Living In Oblivion, The Disaster Artist, or Dolemite Is My Name; not by a long shot (if The Bubble looks intriguing to you, just watch any of those films instead. They're all much better).
This and a few COVID-era stand up specials (most notably Aziz Ansari's latest middling half-hour special) have shown that to make COVID funny, you have to make something really good, clever, or creative. It's becoming apparent that it's a hard subject to make funny. I don't think it's impossible to laugh at parts of it, but given its so recent and so many of us are still living through it, bad to average COVID-themed humour lands with more of a dull thud than bad to average regular humour.
Plus, it doesn't help that a lot of the jokes here that aren't particularly relevant to the pandemic are pretty toothless and boring. The banter just isn't funny- the semi-improvised sounding types of conversations that were funny in Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up just aren't funny here.
I smiled a little a couple of times, but when your comedy's over a couple of hours long, that's just not enough. I checked the time at one point, thinking I was a over halfway done, and I was less than 40 minutes in. I checked it again when I felt like there was half an hour left, and there was still 65 minutes to go.
It's not good. And it uses a terrible Miley Cyrus cover of Heart of Glass at one point, which was a bit offensive.