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Bubble Boy (2001)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:18
Fresh:5
Rotten:13
Average Rating:3.9/10
Consensus: Bubble Boy bounces along with lame, offensive jokes that are more tasteless than funny.
Theatrical Release:Aug 24, 2001 Wide
Box Office: $4,211,321
Synopsis: BUBBLE BOY is a zany and lighthearted but irreverent road comedy from music video director Blair Hayes. Jake Gyllenhaal (OCTOBER SKY) stars as Jimmy Livingston, a young man born with an immune... BUBBLE BOY is a zany and lighthearted but irreverent road comedy from music video director Blair Hayes. Jake Gyllenhaal (OCTOBER SKY) stars as Jimmy Livingston, a young man born with an immune deficiency, who is forced to spend his life inside a sterile plastic bubble. His overprotective, fanatical right-wing Christian mother (Swoosie Kurtz) doesn't let him have friends, and the only TV show she lets him watch is LAND OF THE LOST. The pretty girl next door, Chloe (Marley Shelton) visits him, and the two become friends. Because they can't touch each other through his bubble, they keep their passions in check, but when Chloe goes to Niagara Falls to marry her creepy boyfriend, Jimmy builds a portable bubble and leaves home for the first time to stop her. BUBBLE BOY may offend some with its jokes involving religion and sex and physical deformity, but it's clear that the filmmakers push the envelope, not simply to shock, but to make cogent points about tolerance. The film features surprisingly strong and funny supporting performances from Vern Troyer (Mini-Me from AUSTIN POWERS) and Fabio. In the lead role, Gyllenhaal projects such genuine wide-eyed sweetness that it's impossible not to root for him. [More]
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Marley Shelton, Swoosie Kurtz, Geoffrey Arend
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Marley Shelton, Swoosie Kurtz, Geoffrey Arend, Beetlejuice, Betty Blowtorch, John Carroll Lynch, Dave Sheridan, Stephen Spinella, Danny Trejo, Verne Troyer, Stacy Keibler
Director: Blair Hayes
Director: Blair Hayes
Screenwriter: Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio
Studio: Touchstone Pictures
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Release:
Jan 15, 2002
Reviews for Bubble Boy
Hayes shows a deft touch with both cartoony slapstick and character-based comedy and manages to create moments of real poignancy in between.
Seldom has a more misguided movie escaped from a major studio than Touchstone's Bubble Boy.
This amazingly tasteless, gross-out comedy is full of cruel jokes, stupid characters, schmaltzy sentimentality and situations that make no sense.
After enduring only a few minutes of this shrill debacle, you'll feel more trapped in the theater than Jimmy is by his bubble.
Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.
It's impossible not to respond to Gyllenhaal's sweetness, wide eyes and dazzling smile, or to imagine anyone whose looks or personality would be more perfectly suited to the role.
Another smart-alecky road comedy with something to offend half the population.
While this critic generally likes it when comedies trample on p.c. pieties, Bubble Boy crosses way over the line.
It's got a brain that occasionally works, a ticker that sometimes pulses, and a nose intermittently keen to the whiff of hypocrisy.
Utterly stupid and devoid of any redeeming features, Bubble Boy manages to be much better than it has any right to be.
Goes through the motions of being outrageous when all it's really got is a rage to conform to formula.
When it clicks, the picture should shock you into laughter -- enough to make you wish it were better and applaud its efforts anyway.
If anything, it's the filmmakers who seem insulated, working cluelessly within the plastic bubble of Hollywood.
As sweet and resonant a Candide figure as American cinema has generated in years, Jimmy is also an original and undeniable metaphor for adolescent apartness.
If unfunny isn't enough, the flick is also guilty of unforgivable smugness.
The frothy Bubble Boy evaporates without delivering enough belly laughs.
A sad, badly made, badly written little flick full of outrageously gross gags, insipid jokes and tasteless visual puns.
Latest News for Bubble Boy
January 03, 2006:
'Dust in the Wind'…"Old School's" Patrick Cranshaw Passes Away
Patrick Cranshaw, the actor best known as Will Ferrell's elderly frat buddy Joseph "Blue" Palansky in 2003's "Old School," has passed away at the age of 86. More...
June 06, 2001:
Osbourne dropped out of the project before his filming started. ![]()
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June 06, 2001:
No, this only sounds like a feature length version of a Seinfeld episode. ![]()
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| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
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| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
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