Better than it looks, somewhat

Given a comedy about old friends who get in a hot tub and go back to the ’80s to relive a formative weekend, you could have two possible outcomes — it could be hilarious or it could be terrible.

Meet option No. 3: “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a little of both.

The disparity grows from the screenwriters working from conflicting impulses. Part of the time, they want to contemplate how human potential can go unfulfilled and how our choices determine our fate. The rest of the time, they want to show us bouncing breasts and multiple scenes of urination and projectile vomiting.

The filmmakers often go too far in their efforts to be naughty little R-rated boys. But the scattered funny bits are usually worth the wait.


John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry star as middle-aged men unhappy with their wasted lives; Clark Duke co-stars as Cusack’s nephew, the sort of young man who lives in his uncle’s basement and plays on the computer all day. As a way to cheer up the most depressed of them, the four go to a ski resort where the older men spent some of the happiest days of their youthful lives. But the resort, too, has fallen on hard times. Dispirited, they pile into the hot tub, and suddenly they're back in 1986 again.

At first, the movie aims for the most obvious jokes about the ’80s — the big hair, the bright clothes, the leg warmers and a joke about Michael Jackson that was undoubtedly a whole lot funnier when it was written. But then the story kicks in and the characters realize they have to relive the past exactly as it happened or risk changing everything in the future. The problem is, that particular weekend wasn’t great for any of them.

This scenario has a good deal of promise, particularly if you have seen “Back to the Future” and are willing to appropriate one of the best scenes and one of the major actors (Crispin Glover, mistreated here but weirdly amusing). The problem is, the filmmakers filter their ideas through the modern sieve of gross-out, sex-talk, post-Judd Apatow humor.

Director Steve Pink is the worst offender. Pink, who wrote the superior “Grosse Pointe Blank” (also starring Cusack), doesn’t know which tone to pick. So he picks them all. He allows Corddry to act as if he were in a different movie from the rest of the cast and slams home the physical humor while almost ignoring the funnier character-related verbal jokes.

Usually, the people who make trailers for comedies choose all the best parts, implying that it is the most hilarious film of all time. The trailer for “Hot Tub Time Machine” has no funny parts at all, making you think that it is screechingly awful. As is so often the case with this particular movie, the truth lies somewhere in between.