The problem with trying to make jokes about the '80s is the decade was itself one big joke.
Leg warmers! See? That's a punchline that requires no setup. Or how about that hair? It looks like '80s ladies got their perms in cotton candy machines, am I right? Not that the guys are any better. I mean, have you seen (BANG! shoots self).
You know what else doesn't really work? Time travel stories. I can say this with authority because I myself have written some terrible ones. It's just a played out idea. By this point, the corpse of the '80s has been looted almost as thoroughly as time travel, but Hot Tub Time Machine pries some real jewels off those mummified hands.
Friends John Cusack, Craig Robinson, and Rob Corddry's lives haven't turned out the way they hoped. After an accident puts Corddry in the hospital--the doctors suspect it was a suicide attempt--the three friends and Cusack's nephew Clark Duke head out to the ski resort they loved from their youth, hoping to recapture some of the good old days.
Turn's out the town's fallen apart as hard as their personal lives. That night, a drunken hot tub mishaps zaps them back in time to 1986. It's a chance to set things right, but any changes to their behavior might result in a dangerously different future.
On the ridiculous premise scale, Hot Tub Time Machine really isn't as foolish as it sounds. All time machines are ridiculous, whether they're the flabtrabulous Victorian contraptions of classic sci-fi or a hot tub powered by illegal Russian energy drinks. It wasn't the concept that had me leery of this movie. It was the writers.
Sean Anders and John Morris had just come out with the cartoonish She's Out of My League, and in clear contravention of the Stripper Theory of Screenwriting--that for every writer past the second, the script gets increasingly messy, sticky, and confusing--Hot Tub Time Machine adds Josh Heald. Together, the three stomp my plucky little theory into theory-glue.
Turns out this thing is damn funny. Yeah, the characters are somewhat unexceptional, with Corddry as the jerky troublemaking friend none of the other friends really likes and Cusack as...some guy who looks like John Cusack. In a stunning turn of events, their adventuring party also includes a nerd.
But the writers milk their "We can't change anything or we'll return to a future where apes rule man!" premise so hard they could open a dairy. (One where "This milk tastes funny" isn't a complaint. Damn it, I can't believe I just wrote that.)
None of these characters are scientists. Their only reference points for time travel are movies like Terminator and The Butterfly Effect. Their pop culture-fueled theories on how to handle their predicament are hilarious enough, but their bickering, incompetent attempts to live up to those theories are even better.
A fair amount of Hot Tub Time Machine's jokes don't stand any kind of scrutiny (just how far can a squirrel run in one day? And in a pre-Internet era, how did Robinson so easily find his then-9-years-old future wife's home number?), but director Steve Pink breezes past them with an elusiveness that makes you look like the fool.
All this comedic momentum is carried through to a huge, aptly ludicrous ending that squeezes even more mileage out of its premise. Delirious and fun, Hot Tub Time Machine is the rare absurd-concept movie where the jokes don't end with its title.
Grade: B+
