Hot Tub Time Machine

Time to pine for the '80s. A buddy movie spattered with a nonsensical sci-fi premise, Hot Tub Time Machine recalls the naïve filth and inconsequential narrative of that decadent decade's funsplotation flicks. Lou, Nick and Adam are middle-aged, former best friends who've lost touch. After Lou makes a weak suicide attempt, his old buddies take him on a trip to their favourite old ski resort haunt to raise his spirits. Adam (John Cusack) brings along his geek nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), effectively providing an incredulous conduit for their connection to a cultural time period predating his birth. The place is a dilapidated, near-ghost town, complemented by an angry, one-armed concierge, played by Crispin Glover, in one of many chuckle worthy nods to '80s iconography. Mysteriously, the room's broken down hot tub starts working and the guys decide to take a drunken dip. One spilled illegal foreign energy drink later and they wake up in the '80s, inhabiting their younger bodies to all eyes except their own. Oh, and since Jacob wasn't born yet, he's just there, but starts flickering in and out of existence as the trio of doofuses begin to veer from the original path they lived out. Cusack is solid enough as a drug-addled, Hunter S. Thompson wannabe, but Rob Corddry as hyperactive, filth-spewing asshole Lou and Craig Robinson as pussy-whipped, failed musician Nick Webber steal the show. Clark Duke rises above the weaker writing of his character with masterful comic timing and Crispin Glover delights as an almost super-heroic man we're waiting horrid tragedy to befall. Chevy Chase is thrown in for good measure, as the hot tub repairman who may or may not hold the answers to questions largely irrelevant to a story that doesn't wrap up quite as expected. An unrated version expectedly amps up the foul sexual humour, leaving only a handful of deleted scenes for features. Rob Corrdry and Craig Robinson's demented improvisations are worthwhile, but there had to be more gag-reel-worthy material left on the cutting room floor somewhere. It's a good film for some crass jokes, but there's a lot more to laugh at for viewers who lived through the time period being parodied.