Hot Tub Time Machine

My temporary job ended last week, so before I start my work for the U.S. Census Bureau next week, I had a week to myself. I had become so enamored with the lovely actress from Kick-Ass, Lyndsy Fonseca (who also has a spread in the current issue of Maxim) that I sought out her other current film, which ordinarily I would not have seen. Fortunately I went to the theater where I used to work, and thus saw it for nothing. That's about how much it is worth.

Directed by Steve Pink, Hot Tub Time Machine is another in a long line of raunchy comedies that relies more on bodily fluids than wit. Some films like this, such as Superbad and The Hangover, succeed beyond wildest expectations. Not so Hot Tub Time Machine, a film that seems to have started with a title and has added little else but a vulgarized retread of Back to the Future plot points.

Three friends, all creeping into middle age and profoundly unhappy, decide to take a vacation back to the ski lodge where they had a great time when they were young. John Cusack, recently broken up with his girlfriend, Craig Robinson, who gave up his music career and now works in a dog-grooming shop, and Rob Corddry, who's such a mess that he ends up accidentally poisoning himself with carbon monoxide. Tagging along is Cusack's nerd nephew, Clark Duke.

The resort, they come to find, is badly rundown, with a one-armed bellhop (Crispin Glover, surely a nod to Back to the Future), and a dead raccoon in the hot tub. They call down to have it fixed, and when it is they get in and weird things happen and they are suddenly back in 1986. To pave over script problems, they are also magically in their younger bodies. I wonder if this film sat on the shelf for the while, since they constantly mention that they are twenty years in the past (this includes a key plot point with Duke's conception), though in reality they are twenty-four years in the past. Of course, it's just a stupid movie. A very stupid movie.

So we get basically a rehash of Back to the Future, with the characters recapturing their youth without changing things (as they are warned by the hot tub repairman, Chevy Chase). We even have a scene where Robinson takes to the stage and plays contemporary music (as did Michael J. Fox in the original) and Duke has to keep himself from disappearing by making sure his conception occurs.

The problem is more than unoriginality, though. There's also a distinct lack of genuine laughs. I never did laugh, and smiled only a few times. There was a quick reference to John Cusack's role in Better Off Dead, and Robinson provides some good will with his nice performance (a reference is made to his member looking like "Gary Coleman's forearm"), but the rest is just nasty and unfunny, like a squirrel getting vomited on or a character covering his face in hand-soap to make it look like semen. Cusack sleepwalks through the film, and Corddry is a disaster. His character is all id, a foul, obnoxious cretin that has no shading. It's hard to believe he could function in society.

As for Lyndsy Fonseca? She looks great. The thirty seconds or so of her flouncing around in lingerie is the best part of the movie.