Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/18/10
Forget Liberal vs. Conservative.
The real movie culture war is the one between Funny and Good. Oh,
I'm not saying that a funny movie CAN'T be good (in fact, I demand it),
but I do insist that funny alone doesn't MAKE a movie good. But you
hear the opposite all the time, people calling the Critical Elite to the
carpet for a stern “What did you expect?!? It's not Hamlet,
it's just funny!” Problem is, while a movie with unlikable characters
and a lame plot can make me laugh, it's hard for that kind of shambling
wreck to rise to the levels of hilarity that would be necessary to turn
a blind eye to a story that doesn't work in any way. Exhibit A:
Hot Tub Time Machine, the oh-so-glorious title applied to Steve
Pink's blue-humored quasi-remake of Back to the Future that sends
three middle-aged guys and a token young dude back to the 80's to relive
a weekend of hijinxs. Time Machine delivers consistent chuckles,
but precious few belly laughs and seems to take its hard-to-warm-up-to
characters and total lack of narrative engagement as virtues. “Hey,
man, it's supposed to be FUNNY!” Let the arguments begin.
Adam (John Cusack) cleans
up after the departure of yet another girlfriend driven off by his obsessive,
controlling ways. He's got his nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) living in
the basement, a gift from his estranged screw-up of a sister Kelly (Collette
Wolfe). He hasn't seen much of his friend Nick (Craig Robinson),
a former musician who now cleans up unspeakable messes at a pet care place,
and neither of them has time to return the phone calls of screw-up pal
Lou (Rob Corddry). That changes when they get a call from the hospital.
It seems Lou was found in his garage with the car running, an apparent
suicide attempt. While he denies it, Lou's doctors ask his reluctant
friends to keep an eye on him, and they decide to do so with a road trip,
with Jacob in tow, to the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort, where they had some
great times as kids. Kodiak Valley hasn't turned out any better than
the former pals: it's a boarded-up, smelly dump. At least their
room's got a hot tub, albeit one with a dead animal in it, and when it
finally gets fired up, they enjoy a fuzzy, drunken night that ends with
the tub shorted out and the resort oddly different. Their one-armed
bellhop Phil (Crispin Glover) now has both limbs back. Everyone's
dressed like they did in the boys' teenage salad days, and a look in the
mirror reveals a shock: Adam, Nick and Lou are now their younger
selves. Yes, it's 1986, and until a mysterious Repairman (Chevy Chase)
can get the hot tub running again, they're stuck in their own pasts.
Sci-Fi geek Jacob reminds them that they change the past at their peril,
which means the boys will need to relive a weekend that includes Adam breaking
up with the girl of his dreams (Lyndsy Fonseca), Nick “cheating” on his
future wife with a groupie, and Lou getting beaten senseless by bully Blaine
(Sebastian Stan). But, even as Jacob starts blinking in and out of
existence, making a few changes to that rotten future couldn't hurt, could
it?
Nah, because Hot Tub Time
Machine probably cares less about any theory of time travel, scientific
or cinematic, than any movie ever made on the subject. Sometimes
you can change the past, sometimes you can't. Sometimes doing so
affects nothing, sometimes it rearranges a person's entire future.
The Repairman (Chevy Chase gives the Don Knotts role from Pleasantville
more gravity and menace than it deserves) wanders in and out babbling nonsense
that coyly tells Jacob exactly what he needs to do, but never why.
The total lack of any reason why a hot tub would be a time machine or furthermore
why there's clearly some mysterious network of them overseen by a shadowy
organization, might have made its own fun with the right spin, but instead
we get a script that just doesn't care that those questions exist.
What the “but it's FUNNY!” crowd doesn't get is how much funnier the movie
could be if it could establish any sort of internal logic as a jumping-off
point for its jokes. On the plus side, the script by Josh Heald,
Sean Anders, John Morris and countless uncredited others is able to stage
exactly one terrific gag about the Butterfly Effect, and does make the
question of how Phil's going to lose that arm into a funny running joke.
And while what the film stages doesn't seem all that much like the 80's
(more like an 80's costume party), it is able to line up easy targets in
the fashions and icons of the time and amusingly knock them down.
But at heart, Hot Tub
Time Machine is really just a raunchy teen sex comedy where the teens
are in their 40's. And none of the actors know quite what to do with
that idea. Adam and Nick are forced to trudge wearily through the
steps of what was an adventure for their younger selves, and both Robinson
and particularly Cusack seem to be phoning in their performances.
Cusack is forced to utter the single worst “this is my secret sorrow” speech
in movie history, and it would be hilarious if he gave any hint it wasn't
supposed to be serious. Lou, on the other hand, is so desperate to
grab hold of this second chance he's actually pretty creepy, and Corddry,
who tends to specialize in unlikable characters, is really only successful
at making us understand why his friends had come to avoid him. Oddly,
the film seems to have been recut into the most Lou-heavy form possible,
perhaps because the lout does get the majority of the punchlines, and that's
all Hot Tub has going for it. Performances in the supporting
roles are adequate, with Duke getting some mileage out of the role reversal
of the youngest member of the travel party being the one who has to keep
laying down the law, although he too falls prey to the low energy level.
Glover's an old pro with the slapstick and has the most luck of anyone
in the movie generating empathy. Stan does a pretty good job summoning
the Roid Rage Jock villain every 80's comedy needed. And both Wolfe
and Lizzy Caplan do the best they can with their material, although they
both seem nowhere near the age they're supposed to be in either the past
or the present.
*****SPOILER ALERT!
ANNOYING ENDING TO BE DISCUSSED HEREAFTER***** Hot Tub Time Machine
fancies itself a riff on Back to the Future (right down to Glover's
involvement), and in fact comes off very much like the sort of lame result
we'd get if the remake rights were purchased to be “reimagined” as a vehicle
for a raunchy comedian. As such, it's interesting to watch the movie
re-enact Future's ending while completely missing its point.
It's one thing to do good deeds that help others alter their past in a
way that circles back around and fixes your life upon returning to the
present: Marty McFly's reward at the end of his adventure is earned.
Adam and Nick, on the other hand, do nothing to help anyone but themselves
(and not even really that), then leave Lou behind as a sort of futuristic
insider trader to fix their futures so upon their return they've got lives
of love, wealth and privilege waiting for them that they haven't had to
lift a finger past, present or anywhere in-between to deserve. And
it's not even funny. *****END OF SPOILERS*****
Hot Tub Time Machine
is one of those movies that seems to be chugging along OK until it ends
with a thud, leaves me cold and then forces me to evaluate why I didn't
like it as much as I seemed to while it was going. It's an empty,
soulless exercise in cheap jokes and lame plotting that, yes, is good for
a few laughs. But in the end, when the only lesson the characters
and filmmakers seem to take out of the 80's is that greed, for lack of
a better word, is good, the joke is on the viewer. Whether you choose
to laugh at it, that's your call. |
