HOT TUB TIME MACHINE review

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE review

Apr 23

Ah, the time travel adventure comedy film, that sacred ground broken nearly three decades ago by the superior Back To The Future, and rarely visited since. I guess it’s about time for another one to come along then, what with the 80s being the hotbed of nostalgia currently being explored in every facet of pop culture these days, and Hot Tub Time Machine is that film.

Right up front, the main problem with Hot Tub Time Machine is that it just isn’t very funny. All the “look how stupid the 80s were” jokes are in the trailer, and the character-based laughs don’t come off very strongly, leaving the lacklustre plot and dialogue to pick up the slack. Don’t expect a riot and you won’t be disappointed.

Less significant a problem is the characters. They feel absurdly juvenile, like a bunch of mature 40-year-olds pushed through the bromantic Apatow Juvenile-O-Matic ringer, and they come off as occasionally shrill, sometimes sincere, and often annoying as a result. Rob Corddry in particular is annoying as hell in this movie, as the pathological asshole of the group, and I kept wishing the film would stop focusing on him and his bromance with John Cusack.

Then there’s the look of the film — would it kill comedy filmmakers to shoot their films with even a modicum of style or design? The frames are dull and the colours are flat (even the fluoro 80s fashion fails to pop on-screen) — perhaps a quick look at Kick-Ass could serve as an example of unique ways to grade a comedy film?

Other areas of the film fare better. Clark Duke and Craig Robinson aren’t the focal point of the film, being non-essential tagalongs to the film’s main bromance, but their lines and delivery are leaps and bounds ahead of Corddry’s, and sometimes they even manage to outclass John Cusack. The best line in the film is reserved for Robinson’s character, but I won’t spoil it for you here.

The script works hard to build an established, decades-old friendship between the main characters, and constant references to “great white buffalo” and “Cincinnati” serve to simultaneously frustrate and amuse us, as well as Duke’s nephew character, as we have no idea what they’re talking about. But the characters do, and the in-jokes make them seem more human, somehow.

Crispin Glover’s extended cameo has set the interwebs abuzz, as has Chevy Chase’s role in the flick, but honestly I didn’t really dig either cameo. Yeah, I get the Back To The Future reference, it’s ironic, that’s great, but it felt like the film stopped dead in its tracks every thirty minutes and said “Look! Crispin Glover! See? We got Crispin Glover? Did you know that Crispin Glover is in this movie?” and it absolutely killed the pace of the movie for me. Ditto Chevy Chase; though his character is marginally more important to the plot, it was still annoying to halt the movie just for the sake of celebrity cameo.

That leads into another problem with the film: it’s too long, by at least half an hour, possibly more. Way too much time is spent in the present day establishing our characters, and once they get to the 80s, the pace and tension continue to cruise along in neutral, rather than kicking it up a gear. Surely more of the fat could’ve been trimmed — perhaps all the scenes with Rob Corddry on his own? I really didn’t like him here, for some reason.

Then there’s the confusing treatment of the time travel conceit. It’s more like astral projection, in that their current brains are teleported back into their 1980s bodies, but as Clark Duke points out, they should be careful to observe the potential effects of the butterfly effect anyway. But the stakes of causality are never really set up, and then the ending goes ahead and throws all that crap out the window, resulting in a greedy (greed is good, right?) resolution that doesn’t quite feel right. I’m being vague for fear of spoilers, but the ending totally tanked for me, and I’ll leave it at that.

It sounds like there are a lot of negatives here, but at the end of the day, Hot Tub Time Machine is just average. For the few things it does right, it does a couple wrong, and it all balances out to “meh.” Certainly it’s no better or worse than the next Apatow-esque foul-mouthed odyssey of Platonic love between two heterosexual males (and nothing else!), and as such can’t really be recommended with anything other than a shrug.

Hot Tub Time Machine score

53/100