Steven M. Finkelstein

Okay, now before you even ask the question why I would pay money to see something like this, let me just tell you: Meg and I got a pair of free passes to the premier when she was selling her soaps at a comic convention this past Saturday. That’s the only reason I would ever be caught watching something like this in theaters. That being said, I’ll see just about any movie for free, though I was going into this one with incredibly low expectations. After all, the title is “Hot Tub Time Machine.” That’s basically all you need to know about the experience you’re going to have. Maybe it’s because my expectations were so low, or maybe it was because I was a little sleep deprived and everything was way funnier than it should have been, but honestly, it wasn’t that bad. Successful comedy is mainly about content, pacing, and delivery, and all three were working pretty well here. It was a bit of slapstick, some drug humor, and a healthy mix of gross out; the premise, essentially, is that three loser middle-aged friends (John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson) go back to a ski resort where they spent some of their happiest times in the mid 80’s, along with Cusack’s 20 year old nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke). The resort is run-down now, but their room does come equipped with a hot tub that turns out to be, you guessed it, a time machine. They’re blasted back to 1986, and then there’s general time travel fueled humor, with Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase coming along for the ride. What makes it all click is that there isn’t a whole lot of effort to explain why the hot tub is magic; it just is, and the frantic foursome decides that probably the best way to deal with it is to do every drug in sight, hook up with promiscuous 80’s sluts, and babble incoherently about the butterfly effect (both the well known principle of time-travel and the Ashton Kutcher movie). The three friends are trying to do the identical things they did the last time they were here, so they don’t mess up the future, while the nephew is just trying not to mess anything up so that he isn’t born.

The whole thing feels a bit like the South Park episode where the boys go to the ski resort and the whole thing is a parody of an 80’s movie, except in live action with the R rating. The pacing is good…seldom do things lag, it just goes tearing from joke to joke to joke, so that even if one of them falls flat every once in a while, there’s another one to pick it up a few seconds later. There are a few serious moments that gravitate around the ideas of destiny, whether things are predetermined, etc, etc, but luckily, they’re few and far between. The timing of the delivery for all of the principles is spot-on, for Cusack, certainly, who goes gleefully back to his comic roots, for Corddry, who’s been surprising me with a fairly successful post-Daily Show movie career, and also with Craig Robinson, an underrated comedian probably best known previously for his role as an enforcer in the movie Pineapple Express. The best scenes, unsurprisingly, are with Chevy Chase as the cryptic hot tub repair man; we have just as little explanation for why he’s there as for why the tub is a time machine in the first place.

At the end of an hour and forty minutes, this movie provided more laughs than any I’ve seen in quite some time, the equal of last years’ The Hangover, and not quite as good as Superbad from a couple of years back. I don’t do the comedy genre too much, at least not in theaters. It takes good reviews across the board for me to even consider it, and were it not for the fact that the tickets were free, like I said, I wouldn’t have bothered. But it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised, as I was in this case. It was good to be reminded that sometimes you need to just turn off your brain and have a good laugh at a squirrel being puked on. My rating: 6/10.