March 30, 2010: Hot Tub Time Machine
Ooh, I’ve been looking forward to writing about this one! I see a lot of silly comedies in the theatre, which means that I see a lot of trailers for new silly comedies, since the studios and distributors try to match up the trailers with the tone of the film which is about to play. So I saw the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine a few times during Oscar season, and was looking forward to it as a palate-cleanser once I closed out my affair with the high-falutin’ awards bait for another year. And yes, I know that plenty of these comedies are not worth seeing, but Hot Tub Time Machine is not one of those.
Mind you, it’s certainly not perfect. The film doesn’t ever really choose whether it’s trying to appeal to 40-year-olds or 14-year-olds, so the clever retro 1980s jokes are mixed in with gross-out gags involving pretty much the full spectrum of bodily fluids. This puts to shame even some of the American Pie direct-to-video sequels that nobody has ever heard of, which go far beyond the iconic and in retrospect almost sweetly innocent pie-humping scene from the 1999 original. Not that I mind all this messiness, of course, but I can understand how some viewers might be put off by it. We’ve come a long way since There’s Something About Mary (1998). I’ve also noted before that I like gleefully profane movies, and this is certainly one of them – if you’re going to jump up to the R-rating by using the “f” word more than once, you might as well use it over 200 times in 1 hour and 40 minutes, right? Getting (back?) to the story, the way the conflict will be resolved is more or less predictable after a certain point, but we do get some surprises at the end which are funny and believable enough (if you can accept them in a time-travel context) to make me forgive the sometimes by-the-numbers plotting. Which girl does John Cusack end up with? You don’t need me to tell you – you’ll figure it out on your own.
This leaves us with a patently ridiculous but entertaining plot device, some good chemistry among the leads, and time travel logic which only has to reference classic movies like Back to the Future (1985) when it seems to be going off-track, to bring it right back on. The key foursome here are John Cusack and Craig Robinson as the estranged friends of a suicidal Rob Corddry, who must be kept under direct supervision in order to be released from the hospital and doesn’t have any family or friends aside from these two high school buddies who usually try to avoid him because of his annoying personality. To pass the time while they are looking after Corddry, the group decides to go for a ski weekend at the old resort they used to go to back in the mid-1980s. They take along Cusack’s geeky nephew, played by Clark Duke. Upon their arrival at the resort, they realize it isn’t the lively vacation spot it once was, with the only the remaining remnant of the old days being the doorman, played by 1980s regular Crispin Glover (probably best known as Michael J. Fox’s father in the Back to the Future movies), who is just as run down as the resort. Disappointed, the guys try to make the best of the weekend by firing up the hot tub on the back deck outside their suite, and a little circuit-frying from a spilled energy drink causes the hot tub to transport them back to 1986, on a weekend when they actually happened to be at the resort and lots of pivotal events from their lives transpired.
What follows is a mix of crazy 1980s pop culture throwbacks, some time travel exposition to explain what is happening, arguments about whether the solution is to play things exactly as before or make changes to try to improve their futures, and a failed attempt at having 1980s fixture Chevy Chase, as a handyman assigned to fix the hot tub, cryptically guide the group to the correct actions. Hot Tub Time Machine is undeniably uneven, but it comes out positive in the end for me, because Cusack is in his groove, Craig Robinson is a diamond in the rough in everything he’s in and this film finally gives him a chance to shine in a major role, Corddry plays over the top with great success, and Clark Duke, despite a rough beginning, eventually meshes with the group and leads the charge as they try to get back home. This film is obviously one in what will be a LONG string of ripoffs of last year’s successful R-rated comedy “The Hangover”, and while I didn’t much like that one despite its $300M box office take, this seems a worthy copy.
So what’s the pedigree of this film? Why does it work? Well, director Steve Pink doesn’t have much of a history in that position, with the 2006 feature Accepted being his only “significant” work, if you can call it that. That was also a silly comedy starring Rob Corddry, and an acquired taste from what I saw during a quick look at it. Pink has written roles for John Cusack before, though, penning two of the significant films – High Fidelity (2000) and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) – which resurrected his sardonic comedy cred after his 1980s flame dimmed and his career took a less clear direction. So we know Pink can write funny and sarcastic, and can put together a plot that makes sense, and can make Cusack appealing. Craig Robinson as the other “normal” friend has been paying his dues as Darryl, the guy who runs the warehouse in the US TV version of The Office, for several years now, but he’s plugged into the Hollywood comedy circles having made appearances in Judd Apatow-related films such as Pineapple Express (2008), Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), and having shown up in Arrested Development, a show where if you look beyond the main cast, you’ll see just about every relevant comedy face turning up at least once or twice somewhere during those three years. Robinson’s characters are blunt and will say anything, but they have hearts of gold underneath the energy and anger. Rob Corddry spent some years as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a gig which has led to big future success for the likes of Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report), Ed Helms (The Office, The Hangover), Steve Carell (The Office, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Date Night), and others. Corddry absolutely matches the profile of the successes from that show – fearless, politically incorrect, mercilessly funny, and with a distinct personality/persona. In Hot Tub Time Machine, he’s clearly channelling the role pioneered by Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover – the complete spaz (if I may myself go politically incorrect for a moment). He’s made for the role, but he also wraps it in real humanity in a way that Galifianakis failed to do in The Hangover. Clark Duke has been less visible in the past despite minor appearances in some key films of the past few years and the Clark and Michael short films he made with the far better known Michael Cera. I suspect that this, plus Kick-Ass (released a couple of months later) will propel him into the limelight. He can bring respectable intelligence to the geeky roles. Finally, Hot Tub Time Machine wouldn’t be what it is without the creepy yet comforting presence of Crispin Glover, who painted some indelible characters in the 1980s (most notably in the Back to the Future films from 1985-1990 and River’s Edge from 1986), went a little crazy through the ensuing decades, and continues to milk that for all it’s worth. As a tie between 1986 and 2010, Glover brings a wealth of comic relief, pathos, exposition, time travel logic, suspense, and violence to this sometimes piecemeal story.
It’s strange to see 1980s fixtures Cusack and Glover together as if this were actually some movie from that era. Hot Tub Time Machine cares about the characters, and revels in the logic and also the inherent illogic of time travel. I, for one, was happy to see the concept of exploiting future knowledge for financial gain treated as a no-brainer – of course that’s what you would do if you found yourself in the past. This movie will definitely not appeal to all audiences, but if you can deal with some gross-out gags, the rewards are there for those who grew up immersed in the popular culture of the 1980s.
It references Manimal. Gotta love it.
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