As you might expect from the title, Hot Tub Time Machine is a goofy but entertaining move that doesn’t aspire to be much more than a foul-mouthed ode to youth and the Eighties. Three friends and a geeky nephew go on a weekend trip to a winter resort where they hope to briefly recapture the invincibility of their high school years. The resort is now a dilapidated mess, but a bromantic romp in the hot tub adjoining their room somehow hurls the foursome back in time to 1986 to relive the sundry youthful indiscretions they committed during another weekend at the same resort. And from then on, it’s pretty much all leg warmers, feathered hair, time travel clichés, tits, drugs, and nostalgia set to the beat of Eighties cock rock and New Wave.
The script doesn’t do much that’s fresh or outrageous, but the leads (John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson) play well enough off of each other and bring a certain amount of charm to a plot that is patently ridiculous. Things get a little creepy when we watch these thirtysomething (in the eyes of the audience) guys moon over girls who are supposed to be in high school, but that could be part of the movie’s whole gross-out strategy. And speaking of gross-outs, I’m still cringing at the memory of a certain scene involving a catheter. So very, very wrong.
