'The Bubble' review: Good actors trapped in lame comedy

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Actors — they're just like us. That's the story in the "The Bubble," the new movie from Syosset-raised director Judd Apatow ("Trainwreck"), in which a cast of Hollywood has-beens gathers in England in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic to make the sixth movie in the fictional "Cliff Beasts" franchise.

You know the 2020 drill: The actors suffer through weekslong quarantines and endless testing regimens; they're confined to the film set and the hotel; fearful that any onset of illness must be the virus and fighting off waves of boredom when they're not worrying about the rest of it.

Karen Gillan stars as Carol Cobb, who abandoned the cast for the fifth entry in the terrible B-picture franchise and now must return to her roots. Her fellow "Cliff Beasts" ensemble members include characters played by Keegan-Michael Key, Leslie Mann, Iris Apatow, Pedro Pascal and David Duchovny.

The movie, co-written by Apatow and Pam Brady, is streaming on Netflix.

MY SAY "The Bubble" aims to satirize Hollywood egotism in a framework where that approach makes a certain degree of sense.

From the opening crawl through the end of the picture, there are repeated assertions that these actors and crew members are bravely sacrificing themselves for the sake of providing entertainment to a world that could desperately use it.

The movie recognizes that this is, at best, a quaint notion when it comes to real people with real problems. It's also an idea that has been frequently floated in the business, especially when a film production might have been troubled, or required a great deal of actorly preparation.

But unlike, say, Ben Stiller's "Tropic Thunder," this movie is neither sharp nor introspective enough to follow through on this.

Maybe that's because Apatow (as big of an influencer in comedy filmmaking as anyone) is so intrinsically a part of this world, he's trying to mock that he can't have the perspective necessary to do it right.

These characters are certainly foolish. Key's Sean Knox promotes a quasi-religious wellness regimen; Iris Apatow's Krystal Kris seems to know nothing about anything but TikTok; Pascal's Dieter Bravo drifts around the hotel desperately seeking a willing sex partner.

But they're presented as people trying to persist through bizarre circumstances and do their jobs as best as possible. There's no edge to their personalities and nothing revealing about the portrayal of Hollywood aloofness at this particularly fraught moment. The screenplay doesn't regard them with anything more than sitcom-level depth.

And then there's the fact that the stars in "The Bubble" try too hard to generate laughs. There's an undercurrent of desperation in the frenzied dialogue readings and hamming for the camera, as if the skilled people assembled here somehow implicitly felt the need to compensate for the writing by forcing things.

It might have worked better at a running time of about 80 minutes, but in typical Judd Apatow fashion, the picture stretches on past the two-hour mark, repeating the same gimmicks over and over again, to the point where the audience is as worn out as the on-screen actors suffering through an endless film shoot.

BOTTOM LINE Sometimes, even a lot of very talented people make a very bad movie.