Critics reviews

"The Bubble" is often quite funny but—at a little over two hours long—there are sections where it drags or flounders. With material like this, faster (and shorter) is usually funnier.

An overabundance of celebrity cameos and some incoherence aside, The Bubble succeeds because it is just so damn fun. Even with a departure from Apatow’s more muted direction there is an abundance of laughs.

With only a loose narrative, The Bubble plays almost like a series of comic vignettes, and like any sketch show, it can be hit-and-miss.

“The Bubble” is ultimately a mediocre movie about the making of an even worse movie.

Even if the characters on screen didn’t become better artists during the pandemic, then Apatow at least should have. With The Bubble, he seems to have mistaken jokes about moviemaking for moviemaking that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

In some ways, The Bubble is a bit of fresh air for Apatow, who’s long left behind the ensemble antics of his earlier comedies... for long, self-indulgent tales of immature adults trying to find their place in a very complicated world.

Apatow is great when he’s making movies about normal people, and he’s even better when he’s producing someone else’s script, but here he just seems overwhelmed. He ends up falling back on famous friends, dino dicks and musical routines to cover all the flat jokes.

The Bubble is the film no one wanted about the COVID-19 pandemic: It’s instantly dated, frustratingly oblivious, and painfully unfunny.

[The Bubble] is 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.

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.

In the pantheon of celebrities’ pandemic projects, The Bubble is an unbearable new low. Come back, Gal Gadot’s Imagine video, all is forgiven.

The Bubble becomes yet another vapid vanity project with nothing to say... If The Bubble proves anything, it’s that not all art produced during the pandemic will be innately valuable; much of it will also be uninspired drivel.