Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for pervasive crude and sexual humor, nudity, drug use, relentless profanity and brief gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.26.10
Buy DVD: Hot Tub Time Machine
• Buy Blu-Ray: Hot Tub Time Machine (Unrated) [Blu-ray]
Right off the top, you'd expect that a film called Hot Tub Time Machine couldn't possibly live up to its title.
You'd be right.
The good news is that director Steve Pink's men-behaving-badly comedy isn't a complete train wreck; the casting is better than the material deserves, and some of the dialogue is pretty funny ... and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.
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| Jacob (Clark Duke, far right) finds it weird enough to get into a hot tub with three "old dudes" -- from left, Nick (Craig Robinson), Lou (Rob Corddry) and Adam (John Cusack) -- even if one of them (Adam) is his uncle. But things are about to turn much, much stranger, when a combination of unlikely events whisks them all back a quarter-century in time. |
Unfortunately, the script — credited to Josh Heald, Sean Anders and John Morris — indulges overmuch in the filthy conversational style and tawdry poo-poo humor that has become de rigueur in this post-Judd Apatow world. It's hard to think kindly of a flick that opens as one of its main characters shoves a hand into a dog's fundament, in order to retrieve an excrement-covered set of car keys ... which then get tossed into some dweeb's open palm.
Yes, sir: the veritable height of hilarity.
But that's not entirely fair. After a rocky prologue, Hot Tub Time Machine settles into a groove that'll certainly be appreciated by fans of Wedding Crashers
and The Hangover
, and particularly the latter. If watching grown men debase and humiliate themselves is your idea of a good time, then this 'Hot Tub' should provide 93 minutes of utter joy. Our protagonists are one-time best buds who've grown apart over the years, and have reached a mid-life crisis prompted by a failure to amount to anything. Adam (John Cusack) seems reasonably savvy but is an emotional wreck, having been dumped by his most recent girlfriend; Nick (Craig Robinson) chafes at a dead-end job worlds removed from the music star he once hoped to become.
Unabashed hedonist Lou (Rob Corddry), having descended to the depths of loser-dom, makes a half-hearted attempt to end it all. This becomes a wake-up call to Adam and Nick, who brightly propose a road trip to the last place they all had a good time together: a ski resort in Kodiak Valley (actually Fernie, British Columbia), where everything still seemed possible back in the day, when they were poised on the brink of manhood.
