Cotton Candy Bubble Gum (2025)

User Review

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  ScreenZealots

  3 / 10

  Director J Pinder’s “Cotton Candy Bubble Gum” is a movie that tries too hard at every turn. It wants so desperately to be funny but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. From its opening sequence that’s packed with rapid-fire slang and quick pacing to its do-or-die escalation of increasingly outrageous and unfunny scenarios, this is a film where the humor never really clicks. It’s a huge mess from start to finish, and I found very little enjoyable here.
  
  Carter (Nick Darnell) is a 21-year-old mama’s boy who’s still living at home and doesn’t quite have his life together. In his own words, he’s “not very good at being an adult.” When his mom gets engaged to a vindictive cop, Carter is forced to secure a paid promotion at his internship by the end of the day or else face the harsh reality of finding a new place to live. His boss gives him a ridiculous list of tasks to complete, from getting his Jeep detailed (which promptly gets towed) while babysitting his boss’s teenage son (Jack Stone), to dealing with a model overdosing at a party (JadaPaige) and retrieving a sex tape from a world-famous rapper who kidnaps his best friend (Morgan Jay).
  
  The story is all over the place and while the premise sounds fun, it ends up feeling like too much to handle in one movie. There is simply too much going on here, which causes the film to quickly lose focus.
  
  There are a lot of big ideas at play, but Pinder spreads them too thin, making his film feel overstuffed and disjointed. The humor is meant to be wacky and chaotic, but just ends up being stressful. The frantic pace and random events don’t have much of a payoff, and it all feels like the movie is riffing without a concrete narrative. The jokes that are supposed to land with a punch often fall flat, with way too many moments that are so painfully unfunny they actually become hard to watch.
  
  There’s a good cast and the performances are solid, which makes it all the more disappointing that they’re trapped in such an unsuccessful comedy. By focusing so hard on trying to be funny and hip, the heart of the story comes in way too late to salvage the film. By the time it hits the emotional beats, you’re already too exhausted from all the chaos.
  
  “Cotton Candy Bubble Gum” had a lot of potential, but the glimmer of a good story is buried under a mountain of half-baked ideas and clumsy execution.
  
  By: Louisa Moore / SCREEN ZEALOTS

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