The premise may seem far-fetched, but not if you consider that Morocco offered bomb-sniffing monkeys to the “coalition of the willing” for the Iraq War. The leader of the G-Force team is an unconventional human scientist named Ben. The guinea pigs are cast as racial stereotypes.
“Hot Tub Time Machine” is a sex-romp comedy that’s so unclean it needs a heavy dose of chlorine.
The movie starts out with token black guy Nick (Craig Robinson, the guy that plays Darryl from the Office), working at some sort of veterinary clinic, pulling someone’s car keys out of a dog’s ass. Somehow, I wouldn’t find it hard to believe that’s also where they found this script.
Nick and three of his closest friends (John Cusack, Rob Corddry) are all in some sort of rut. They’re all in their 40s and dealing with a mid-life crises. To escape their depression they revisit a ski resort they frequented in the prime of their youth. Upon arriving, they discover that they have a (insert title here) and can activate it by using a combination of secret ingredients.
Apparently all you need to bend time and space is a Russian soda, some vodka, and a magic squirrel, all which must be followed by some sort of weird acid trip that involves receiving a blow job from a bear. The time machine itself is a shameless rip-off of the “Back to the Future” franchise. The digital display is similar to the controls built into the Delorean. All they are missing is a flux capacitor, 86 mph, and 1.21 gigawatts.
Luckily for this flab-tastic four, time travelling has also resulted in them inhabiting their younger bodies. Fearing the risk of creating a time travel paradox more confusing than the plot of “Lost”, the friends pledge not to change anything in the past.
Predictably, they begin to become less faithful to this theory and instead seize upon the opportunity to get laid. Somehow they are less concerned for the safety of the space-time continuum than they are about scoring with crushes from two decades ago.
On that note, there is one time travelling mentor involved, but he appears randomly and disappears just when he is needed most. Dressed like a cable repair man, he proves just as unreliable.
“Hot Tub Time Machine” pays an uncalled-for homage to the crappy movie conventions of the 80s, especially the Ski flicks that defined a period of down-hill movie making. A few examples include Hot Dog, Ski School, Ski Patrol, Aspen Extreme, and Better off Dead. Mostly they just involve a bunch of jock-strap wearing bullies who treat the ski resort as their turf, and harass another group of teen skiers for kicks and giggles.
In this story, the paranoid leader of these jocks assumes that the main characters are Russian spies sent from the Soviet Union. Just because they have an energy drink product called “Cheronblyee”, and he cites “Red Dawn” as a plausible scenario. It might not be much to go on, but it is better than the shabby evidence that made the U.S. invade Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
Eventually the four friends are able to return to the present, but thanks to one friend who stayed behind, everything has changed. By exploiting his knowledge of the future, he becomes a billionaire and enables his friends to become rich and successful as well.
One such exploit involved combining the popularity of Twitter with Viagra. The posts would probably look like this… “OMG, #bonerz has b33n going 4 hours !!!11”
It makes for a good moral to the story, that if you’re poor and miserable, all you have to do is go back in time to change your situation. Then you will be happy when you are rich and powerful.
Hot Tub is nothing more than an excuse to poke fun at the 80s by barraging us with as many pop culture references as possible. Somehow we find it laughable that there was a time when we didn’t know what an email was, phones didn’t play YouTube videos, and our video games came in 8-bit.
In another 30 years they’ll probably do a remake, the only difference being they make fun of this decade. I can just imagine some guy from the future looking at us like we’re a bunch of cavemen. The audience at that premiere will be laughing at us like a bunch of douche bags just because we have obsolete technology.
The background actors would probably be saying cheesy lines like…
“Hey you want to play some Wii or listen to Lady Gaga on my 8GB iPod?”
“Sure, let me just finish watching this Blu-Ray copy of Avatar.”
To us it’s just normal conversation, but by the standards of this film it’s comic genius.
Tags: Craig Robinson, Hot Tub Time Machine, John Cusack, Rob Corddry
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:38 am
great post as usual!