Skip to main contentThe Snakes on a Plane of comedies wasn't screened in time for us to put it in the paper, so we're reviewing it before the paper comes out. Whoa.
Hot Tub Time Machine
WW Critic's Score: 36
The promoters of Hot Tub Time Machine make no bones about wanting to generate The Hangover for 2010—a laudable enough ambition, I suppose, if your idea of a fine night out is seeing the same movie on a loop. That's exactly the goal of this high-concept giggle, which dispatches John Cusack and pals down a ski-lodge Jacuzzi vortex to 1986, where one of the first things they hear is a kid saying, "I want my two dollars!" You know and I know that's a line from Cusack's 1985 bunny-slopes comedy Better Off Dead..., and the movie is very knowing, too, bringing in Crispin Glover in geeky Back to the Future mode as a sign of its sophistication. The past is never dead; it's not even past mugging for laughs in its furry neon leg warmers. But movies always exist as a time capsule, preserving their own moment, and if you want to blow your mind, it's fun to imagine audiences 20 years ahead snidely amused by watching our era's trash digging in another era's somewhat better trash.
It's about as much fun as you're going to have in Hot Tub Time Machine. The movie, directed by a writer of Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity, is not wholly terrible—it gets its chuckles, and includes one notably hardworking performance by Rob Corddry—but its self-consciousness is a burden, and its crudity has a heavy touch. The Hangover wisely kept its debauched setup an enigma, letting the characters groggily stumble toward discovery of their own badness. Time Machine flashes its naughty bits like a Gresham floozy in town for Mardi Gras: Everybody pounds shots of booze while getting naked in the bubble jets, and for a brief instant Cusack's face is superimposed by Ronald Reagan's, a good sign that a night has gone terribly wrong. When the four friends wake up, Corddry projectile vomits onto a squirrel. I got the feeling that the film was already trying to double-dare itself—merely recognizable human behavior wouldn't be enough.
As the requisite hijinks are dutifully checked off (in a recreation of an '80s mountain resort that looks remarkably like a Chuck E. Cheese), Time Machine presses at a rushed tempo. An example: Craig Robinson is permitted to sing "Jesse's Girl"—and devotees of The Office know Robinson can really croon—but the editors splice away from the heart of his performance. The movie can't stand to chill in its own moment. It makes a clamor about middle-aged regret, but unlike this week's Greenberg, Time Machine avoids examining any personalities we wouldn't want to live through vicariously. So the ending (and this is a minor spoiler) is also cribbed from Back to the Future—but that resolution worked because Marty McFly still had his whole life ahead of him, and here most of the characters have been permitted to simply spruce up their own existences without experiencing them. If you think about it at all, Hot Tub Time Machine is an argument against being when and where you are, feeling pain, risking love, working at friendship—against any kind of living. "Better Off Dead" is its motto. I want my two hours. R.
Hot Tub Time Machine opens Friday at Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas, and Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.
WWeek 2015