If The Bubble is any indication, we may not be ready for movie about a long, tedious lockdown. Or maybe we just don’t need a long, tedious movie about a lockdown.

Judd Apatow may have assembled a crack ensemble cast for his latest film, released Friday on Netflix, but even they don’t seem to be up to the task of the heavy-handed art-meets-life, navel-gazing story of pandemic movie-making he wrote with Pam Brady.

Karen Gillan (Guardians of the Galaxy) plays Carol Cobb, ostensibly the film’s main character, an actress who is more than a little familiar with schlock movies, who returns to the cheesy monster movie franchise Cliff Beasts for its sixth installment. The only problem is that the movie is shooting in the early days of pandemic lockdown, before vaccines made life slightly safer than it was before.

Cobb and the rest of the cast meet at a posh hotel in England to begin their Covid lockdown. The exterior scenes were shot at a sumptuous location will put you in mind of Downton Abbey but is actually a hotel called Cliveden House, while the interiors hotel scenes were filmed at Hedsor House, which kind of is important because a lot of the movie takes place there.

After suffering through a boring two-week isolation, Carol meets up with her co-stars, Dustin Mulray (David Duchovny, The X-Files), Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann, This is 40), Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal, The Mandalorian), Sean Knox (Keegan-Michael Key, Schmigadoon), and Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow.) All the cast members except Krystal are franchise regulars, who bear more than a little ill will towards her for sitting out the fifth movie. Young Krystal, who has a sizable and rabid following on TikTok, was added to the cast to take advantage of that.

The cast also meets the director, Darren Elgan (Fred Armisen), who is new to the Cliff Beasts franchise and hopes to give it a more artistic feel, and producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz), who tries valiantly to keep the production on schedule and under budget. There are other crew and staff on hand, notably Ronjon (Vir Das), the hotel owner, Anika (Maria Bakalova), a desk clerk, and Gunther (Harry Trevaldwyn), the Covid safety officer, who tries in vain to set Covid protocols.

At first, the movie shoot goes as well as can be expected, and it’s here where we get a sense of just how cheesy the Cliff Beasts movies are: we first see the action as it appears post-production, with unconvincing dinosaur effects and the same two backgrounds in almost every shot. Then we see the actor’s perspective, where everything is shot on green screen and two hapless motion capture actors are suspended on harnesses, pretending to be dinosaurs.

Things start to go wrong, though, on set and off. Dustin wants to rewrite the script, and he and Lauren rekindle their on-again, off-again marriage. Several cast members catch the flu, and one of the minor cast member quits rather than suffer more quarantining. The scheduled three-month shoot stretches out to five months and beyond, and everyone’s relationships outside the bubble start to suffer or just fall apart.

The studio sends over a security team after the cat defection, and Carol slowly realizes that the cast is trapped in the hotel, literally locked down by the security force. On-set injuries and illnesses threaten to break everyone’s spirits, if not drive them insane before the movie is in the can. The movie shifts into prison break mode: can Carol convince the cast to band together to escape lockdown?

The Bubble is part meta-comedy and part farce, with a few good jokes livening up the acting antics that try to show the wacky, unpredictable side of movie making. But the on-set mishaps are so over the top outrageous and the characters are too broadly stereotypical and unlikable to justify sticking out the two hour plus run time, where the audience feels as trapped in a bubble of monotony as the actors.

The ending has a slight twist that is mildly amusing, and there are some great cameos and brief appearances from comic actors you wish were a bigger part of the film, like Kate McKinnon, Maria Bamford and Rob Delaney. But The Bubble bursts under the weight of directorial self-indulgence and a script that could use a lighter touch, with more wit and less slapstick (and fake vomit).