Writer/director Steve Pink’s Hot Tub Time Machine is a time warp of several kinds. The movie liberally evokes the tacky excess of the ’80s to the point where it lifts the plotting more or less directly from other time travel comedies of the period, like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The film even casts Crispin Glover in a semi-prominent role. Yet despite the neon spandex and awful hair metal, the movie ends up being much funnier than it has any right to be.
Adam (John Cusack, slumming it up like crazy), is a real estate developer who has just been dumped by his “controlling” live-in girlfriend. This triggers his need to reconnect with his high school buddies, who have also fallen on hard times—Nick (Craig Robinson) long ago abandoned a promising music career for suburban stability, while Lou (Rob Corddry) still hasn’t accepted the sad reality that at 40, he needs to stop living like a privileged 20-something on a cocaine bender.
With Adam’s reluctant geek nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), the guys decide to revisit their old stomping ground, a once rambunctious ski town, only to find it spectacularly run-down. Through the miracle of the eponymous Hot Tub Time Machine, the guys are transported back to the heyday of MTV and a “black Michael Jackson.”
Needless to say, the older characters take the opportunity to go back and correct the fatal mistakes of their youth, and try to use their foreknowledge to win money, prevent regrettable breakups, and so on. (Robinson’s character even calls his then nine-year-old wife in a fit of despair to prevent her from cheating on him 20 years later.) The movie doesn’t do much new with its formula, though it isn’t really a homage to the slobs vs. snobs and fish-out-of-water movies of the period.
First-time director Pink mixes the self-awareness and slack raunchiness of the Judd Apatow aesthetic with the familiar structure of those frat comedies of yore. And while the hybrid is never a wholly successful one, there are some pleasantly surprising laughs and an atmosphere of good comic energy. A recurring site gag about Glover’s character losing his arm provides a nice touch of black humour, though the stream of “weren’t people in the ’80s racist/poorly dressed/into Poison/afraid of communists” jokes wears pretty thin after a while.
The movie succeeds primarily on the “Hangover principle,” where casting actual comedic actors can breath life into even the most frequently revisited comic situations. Robinson and Cordry are appropriately henpecked and nasty, respectively, while Duke is a real standout, finally getting the proper role to show off the nebbish skepticism he displayed so well in the Internet series Clark and Michael. His annoyed delivery elevates even the most functionary lines, though his informal style sometimes jibes with the other actors.
Ultimately, Hot Tub Time Machine overcomes the “Snakes on a Plane” syndrome—in which the concept promised in the title is funnier than anything the movie could come up with—by having a sense of fun and self-awareness. It’s exemplified by a scene in which Craig Robinson looks at the camera, and, with perfect deadpan, declares that “it must be a…hot tub time machine” before giving a straight-on, deadly serious glare. It doesn’t quite work, but there’s a certain comfort to overly familiar ideas done well.
Hot Tub Time Machine opens in theatres March 26.
