New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

A supposed comedy, Bubble Boy is just an atrocious mess. Witnessing the surprisingly committed cast try to breathe life into this stillborn film makes watching it even sadder. I didn’t know if I was supposed to feel sorry for Jimmy’s cruel circumstance or laugh at it. I think it was supposed to be a bit of both. No disability, religion, or ethnicity is safe from being mocked here, but the jokes are nothing new and surprisingly vulgar. Seemingly meant for 12-year-old boys and no one else, Bubble Boy bursts before it even lifts off the ground.

Not whimsical enough to be funny and not grounded enough to be relatable, Bubble Boy walks through an awkward limbo that you cannot wait to get out of. At a barely theatrical running time of 84 minutes (I timed it at 77 minutes when I took out the credits), the film still drags into oblivion. First and last time director Blair Hayes can be blamed for the odd breakneck pace of the skits, resulting in little-to-no character background history, making for a boring comedic exercise. There is more character substance in any given Saturday Night Live skit than there is here.

Making a better cartoon than live action feature, one can’t help but wonder if it really was meant to be a cartoon. After all, the opening credit features a hand drawn version of Jake in his bubble suit bouncing against the screen. The constant random subplots are much more fitting for animation, where anything goes. The writing team of Cinco Paul and Kevin Daurio took the cartoon hint, toned down their language, and scripted the animated hits Horton Hears a Who! and the shockingly hilarious and high-grossing Despicable Me (sequel please?).

Released August 24, 2001, the last-ditch attempt weekend before Labor Day where films come to die, Bubble Boy was given a reasonable marketing push and was unleashed in a low theater count of 1,605 venues. Bubble Boy couldn’t even float its way to the top 10, debuting laughably in 13th place with barely $2 million. Opening against four other movies, even Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which had almost half the theaters, opened better. With a pitiful $1,269 per theater average, by week three Bubble Boy bounced out of theaters, winding up with a pitiful $5 million ($8 million below its production budget). Distributor Buena Vista (a branch of Disney) didn't even release it overseas.

Critics were as harsh as audiences, as the film earned a 26% ranking on Rottentomatoes amongst top critics.

With wacky hair and an ear-punishing helium voice, Gyllenhaal does what he can with misguided direction and a broken script. With Donnie Darko released exactly two months later, Gyllenhaal turned away from studio work and took the independent route, building a career for himself instead of brief box office futility – something that would be hard to do after the rejection of Bubble Boy.

Returning to mass audiences in the summer of 2004, starring with Dennis Quaid and CGI in Roland Emmerich’s wildly successful The Day After Tomorrow, Gyllenhaal’s box office power remained up in the air, following the film up with an indie (the underrated Proof), and war drama Jarhead. While war flicks were failing left and right, Jarhead had a powerful $27.7 million launch. A great movie I strongly recommend, Jarhead had a shockingly quick box office run that is normally reserved for horror movies and teen romps. Later that year is when Gyllenhaal truly took off, powering the controversial Brokeback Mountain to an eye-popping $83 million total (an unbelievable accomplishment for a movie that was dubbed a “gay western”) and earning him an Academy Award nomination. Later, Gyllenhaal had a rocky 2007 with the underperforming, David Fincher-directed Zodiac, a brilliant crime drama that Paramount butchered with its release date, and the war-critiquing Rendition, which arguably ended up being Jake’s biggest flop since Bubble Boy. However, the even bigger dud was released three weeks later, as the similarly themed Tom Cruise starrer Lions for Lambs saved Rendition from mortification (Fun fact: Meryl Streep, who had roles in both of those films and had a part in the misfire Evening, was in three of the biggest flops of 2007).

Continued:       1       2       3