Hot Tub Time Machine 2010

Hot Tub Time Machine 2010

Hey, remember in the ’80s when there was this movie called Back to the Future?  Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone made a movie now and they time-traveled to the past and it was the same time as Back to the Future was in the present?

Well, here it is.

In Hot Tub Time Machine, a surprisingly serious incident, a suicide attempt, leads to a series of incidents with absolutely nothing serious in them at all.  To cheer up their depressed friend Lou (The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry), Adam (John Cusack) and Nick (Craig Robinson) return with him to the ski-lodge site of their most raucous youthful parties, accompanied this time by Adam’s 20-year-old nephew Jacob (Clarke Duke).

What happens next could have been written by, well, any of us who saw Back to the Future.  A strange device, this time a hot tub, transports the four back in time to a neon-colored caricature of 1986.  It’s not as cool as it seems (“I want free love!” says Lou.  “Dude, it’s the ‘’80s.  We have Reagan and AIDS,” says Adam) and there’s also the complication of Jacob still needing to be conceived.  To get back to normal, the four must remember and recreate the past, including every event of that night.  Life lessons are learned.  And so on and so forth, punctuated with the kind of tired vomit/blowjob/scatological dude humor that’s been kicked around since Animal House.

And yet…it has its charms.  Sure, it’s a time-travel movie with nothing original in it but Hot Tub knows that.  “Do I really gotta be the asshole who says, ‘We got in this thing and went back in time’?” demands Jacob.  And the characters flow well together; the aggressively comedic, self-destructive, party-nasty Lou, the sentimental, doubting Nick, the twerpy-hip Jacob whose emo glasses and texting habit mark him as the child of this age as much as Marty McFly’s high-tops and skateboard marked him his.

Perhaps most intriguing, though, is Adam as John Cusack.  Who doesn’t remember that iconic scene from Say Anything, symbolic of ’80s rom-coms, when Cusack, as Lloyd Dobler, serenades his girlfriend with a stereo in her driveway? And who can’t help but recall that scene when they see Cusack’s character in Hot Tub, middle-aged and tweaked on shrooms, writing syrupy love poems because his high-school girlfriend just dumped him? There’s a delightfully twisted irony hidden in Hot Tub, though it’s easy to skate across its patina of raunch.

Overall, Hot Tub is a lot like ’80s nostalgia itself: silly but fun, brainless but harmless.  After all, sometimes you just gotta get drunk and belt some Journey.

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