August
24, 2001 | How awful can a movie be without actually leaving a stain
on the screen? Bubble Boy skirts perilously close to the outer
limits of what can be unspooled at a multiplex without making the worst
kind of lasting impression. Indeed, under normal circumstance, it would
be a strong candidate for Worst Movie of 2001. But Freddy Got Fingered
already has a mortal lock on that title, so this fifth-rate farce
will have to settle for second-place dishonors.
I
don't think you want to read much about Bubble Boy, and I know
I don't want to write much about it, but try to imagine something Peter
and Bobby Farrelly might make if they had no talent whatsoever, and
you'll have some idea what to expect. Jake Gyllenhaal reneges on the
promise he displayed in October Sky with his charm-free performance
here as Jimmy Livingston, a 17-year-old doofus who has spent most of
his life inside a plastic dome in an upstairs bedroom of his suburban
California family home. He's allegedly ensconced in this germ-free environment
because of his life-threatening immune deficiency. But it seems much
more likely, given the way Gyllenhaal plays him, that the boy simply
is too stupid to be set loose on his own in the world.
Swoosie
Kurtz embarrasses herself, and us, by playing Jimmy's oppressively protective
mother, a horrendous and hypocritical born-again zealot who rails against
Jews and minorities, bakes cookies in the shape of crucifixes, and rewrites
bedtime stories to repeatedly reinforce a cautionary message: Don't
ever leave home and, more important, always listen to your mother.
Despite
this indoctrination, Jimmy falls for Chloe (Marley Shelton), the girl
next door - or, as his mom calls her, "that slut next door"
- and Chloe in turn is charmed by, among other things, his budding talents
as a rock guitarist. Now you might well wonder why Jimmy's unforgivingly
uptight mom would buy him a guitar in the first place, much less permit
him to play rock music, but never mind: If you stopped to think about
every logical inconsistency in Bubble Boy, you'd never get through
this benighted garbage. Besides, even though it clocks in at less than
85 minutes, the movie seems quite long enough already, thank you very
much.
Jimmy
bursts out of his bubble only after Chloe announces plans to marry a
sleazoid musician (Dave Sheridan, behaving like the third-place runner-up
in a Jim Carrey impersonator contest) in a Niagara Falls ceremony. Following
his heart, Jimmy jury-rigs an airtight bubble outfit to keep himself
healthy and germ-free, then hits the road. Along the way, he encounters
a surly Latino biker, an excitable Indian vendor of curry and ice cream,
a doomsday cult of "Up With People"-style singers (led by
paperback-cover hunk Fabio, who acts as though he gets the joke), a
group of sideshow freaks "owned" by a malignant midget (Verne
Troyer, the Mini-Me of Austin Powers infamy) and a gaggle of
shrieking Asians who bet big money on mud-wrestling matches.
The
makers of Bubble Boy evidently subscribe to the notion that you
can get by with any kind of blatantly offensive ethnic joke or religious
slur as long as you're brazenly upfront and comically overstated in
your political incorrectness. It is, at best, a dubious premise. At
worst - that is, all throughout this movie - the anti-Semitic punchlines,
the ethnic stereotyping, the mockery of the physically challenged and
all the other cheap, nasty, mean-spirited jokes concocted by director
Blair Hayes and screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio fail miserably
because they lack the saving grace of actually being funny.
Typical
of the movie's anything-for-a-laugh shamelessness is a last-minute revelation.
(Spoiler alert: I'm about to reveal the "surprise" ending.)
Jimmy's mother finally fesses up, and reveals that Jimmy hasn't been
immune-deficient since he was four years old. She kept him inside the
bubble only because she never wanted to lose him. Which, when you think
about it, indicates that she isn't just a smothering, hypocritical harpy,
she's also a borderline-psychotic monster. But, then again, I warned
you against thinking too much about anything in this movie, didn't I?