Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

Tub time (L-R): Nick (Craig Robinson), Lou (Rob Corddry), Adam (John Cusack) and Jacob (Clark Duke).

Hot Tub Time Machine
Directed by: Steve Pink
Starring: John Cusack, Clark Duke, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Crispin Glover, Lizzy Caplan and Chevy Chase
Distributed by: Fox

“Could any film live up to the title of Hot Tub Time Machine?” asked Andrew last year. This one does!

Since it’s not called The Best Hot Tub Time Machine In The World or Oscar Buzz Hot Tub Time Machine, it doesn’t promise anything more than it’s capable of delivering. It’s perfectly entertaining popcorn fodder with its heart in the right place. I laughed a helluva lot.

Hot Tub Time Machine is a valentine to Back To The Future. There are the same schmaltzy, over-determined signifiers of ‘pastness’; the gross-out gags about body fluids and anachronistic culture-clashes; meeting mom as a slutty teen; climactic, character-building face-offs with bullies; thrilling partygoers by playing songs from the future (with more than 20 years of amazing pop hits to pick from, Craig Robinson goes for a frickin’ Black Eyed Peas song); and the prospect of fading into non-existence if you don’t ensure your own future birth. Even the protagonists’ return to the future – a lame yet oddly satisfying wish-fulfilment denouement – reminded me of the altered fortunes of the McFly family.

Best of all, there’s Crispin Glover, who begins the film in 2010 with one arm and spends the rest of it in 1986 with two, in an hilarious series of sight gags in which you’re sure he’ll lop it off. It’s nice to see Glover in sweet oddball mode, like George McFly, rather than in creepy psycho mode, as in Charlie’s Angels or Alice In Wonderland.

Hot Tub Time Machine is a throwback to the dorky, zany ’80s teen movies in which we learned to love John Cusack. But it’s also firmly in the tradition of Old School, The Hangover and the forthcoming Grown-Ups – that is, a buddy comedy in which men party hearty in order to rage against the waning of their youth.

Phil the bellboy (Crispin Glover) in one of many tense moments threatening arm amputation.

So there’s a hearty serve of the jokey misogyny and homophobia this genre seems to demand, but somehow our protagonists don’t come across as smug Apatovian manchildren. Despite even their most reprehensible activities, they still seem like decent guys.

Adam (Cusack) has knuckled down to sell real estate; his anxious nephew Jacob (Clark Duke, finally breaking away from that deadweight, Michael Cera) hides from life behind irony and telecommunications. Nick (Craig Robinson) is a pussy-whipped dog groomer who dreamed of being a musician.

And Lou (Rob Corddry) is an alcoholic hair-metal fan with no hair, whose maybe-suicide brings the gang back together for a cheer-up trip back to their former winter playground of Kodiak Valley. They don’t really like Lou any more, but feel a residual loyalty. “He’s our asshole,” Adam explains to the hospital staff.

When they realise the hot tub has taken them back to the seminal (and oh boy, I do mean seminal) weekend of Winterfest ’86, it doesn’t take long before our heroes realise they were pretty lame in the past, too. Do they really have to relive their humiliations, as Stargate-fanfic-writing Jacob insists, or can they learn from their previous mistakes?

Corddry is the real star here. There’s a touching vulnerability beneath Lou’s assholery. Robinson, as well, shines in a much more substantial part than the ‘jolly black sidekick’ roles I’ve seen him in before. Clark Duke is pleasingly geeky, and pretty much all Cusack has to do is look hangdog in a black suit with a white shirt and skinny black tie. (Am I right in thinking this is the Cusack uniform?)

Lizzy Caplan is sparky, as usual, in a small role as Cusack’s love interest, but I was really disappointed by the way Chevy Chase was under-used as the mysterious hot-tub maintenance man. He also seemed really old and weary, which made me sad. If this movie had been made 20 years ago, he’d have had Rob Corddry’s part.

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