1/2

This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

How seriously are we supposed to take Hot Tub Time Machine? Well let’s see. It’s a movie about a time machine. In a hot tub. That really should tell you everything you need to know. Beyond that, Hot Tub Time Machine is actually surprisingly, if sporadically, funny. Eying the spot on the comedy podium held last year by The Hangover, Hot Tub Time Machine attempts to marry the crude vulgarity and buddy comedy of that Las Vegas comedy with the nostalgia and self-referential nods of 80s classics such as Back to the Future.

John Cusack, Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson play three down and out friends who decide to get away to a mountain resort that was the setting of one of the most pivotal weekends in their high school lives. However, the resort, like each of them, has seen better days. That is until they all take a dip in the hot tub and suddenly find themselves back in 1986. (Sure, a Delorean looks cooler, but ultimately one is just as random as the other.) Now they have a chance to right old wrongs, repair mistakes, redress adolescent grievances, arrange threesomes, snort coke and take the untraveled road that only hindsight has revealed was correct. The only person not excited about altering the timeline is Cusack’s nephew, played by Clark Duke, who is afraid that if they change the past too drastically, he’ll never be born.

Hot Tub Time Machine is just an excuse to have an 80s retrospective, make jokes about impractical hair and outlandish clothes, and listen to some infectiously fun music (other than the 50s, name a decade with music as reflexively enjoyable—you’ll be singing along through half the movie). In on the joke, Hot Tube Time Machine doesn’t simply go back in time, but sets itself in one of those cheap 80’s ski comedies they used to churn out several times a year (unfortunately, this new film is about that well directed too), establishing a meta-narrative that takes the high highs and low lows of the decade and packs them all into a single weekend.

At first John Cusack seems woefully out of place. Despite the fact that of all the stars, he alone was making movies in the 80s, Cusack is just too straight laced (and too much of a straight man) to seem comfortable in a raunch-fest like this. By the end, however, as he’s running around in a tan trench coat evoking his immortal Say Anything character, Lloyd Dobler, it becomes obvious why he is the cast’s anchor. (Cusack isn’t the only 80s star to make an appearance. Look out for Back to the Future’s Crispin Glover, a creatively reinvigorated Chevy Chase, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Cobra Kai cameo from The Karate Kid.)

Remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books you read as a kid in the real 80s? Remember how, if you turned to the wrong page and got eaten by a dragon or shot to death by a rampaging robot, you’d simply turn back to the point where you made the mistake and choose again? Hot Tub Time Machine is sort of like that. The film isn’t directed at present-day teens so much as the adults who see their mid-life crisis’ and quiet desperation mirrored on screen and long wistfully for the bygone days when all they lived for was the carefree hedonism only youth allows. While this philosophical undercurrent works for a while, the film’s attempt to instill what is essentially a sex, drugs and rock & roll comedy with some sort of greater significance generally just fizzles. Hot Tub Time Machine works best when it is at its worst. This is not the sort of story in which we need or care to get to know our characters. Anything approaching earnestness just gets in the way of what everyone came to see in the first place—people behaving badly.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by: Steve Pink
Starring: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase
Rated R for strong crude and sexual content, nudity, drug use and pervasive language.
Running time: 100 minutes