Bubble Boy

Jake Gyllenhaal, the young star of the critically well-received October Sky (1999), follows up that film with this offbeat comedy. Gyllenhaal stars as Jimmy Livingston, a teenager with an immune system deficiency who has spent his entire life living in a plastic bubble under the doting, ...more

Disney's Bubble Boy is a gross-out, irreverent comedy with a core of sweetness, in the style of the Farrelly brothers. Its arrival during a summer full of underwhelming would-be Hollywood blockbusters did nothing to ease its reception. Parents of children with immunodeficiency disorder organized in an understandable, if misguided, effort to protest the film's depiction of the illness as a basis for comedy. Critics lashed out at the film in nearly unanimous disdain for its scabrous mockery of ...more