Hot Tub Time Machine, a Rabelaisian comedy about second chances, has to work hard to keep the momentum up and the tastefulness depressed, because it does an awfully good job of establishing a middle-aged malaise for its protagonists in the early scenes. Not so much let down as simply bypassed, they’re men who don’t care to admit that things aren’t quite working out: Adam (John Cusack) has just been abandoned by his girlfriend, Nick (Craig Robinson) has a dead-end job grooming dogs, and Lou (Rob Corddry) has made a spectacular hash of his life by never letting go of his teenage fantasies.
They can barely be bothered to communicate, and only come together after Lou passes drunk behind the wheel and nearly asphyxiates in his garage. Not that it was a suicide attempt – 'If I wanted to kill myself I would be awesome at it," he promises the other two, offering the kind of deluded machismo that the film both enjoys and sends up.
To console each other they decide to return – accompanied by Adam’s nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), a nebbish 20-something who lurks in his basement – to the ski resort that was the centre of their lives 25 years prior, only to find the town boarded up and the resort empty and derelict. It’s an obvious reflection of their own state, which is enough to have them drunk and cavorting in the hot tub, from where they emerge the next morning to find it is 1986.
While the titular device and a ski resort suggests the timeless 1984 teen movie Hot Dog, Hot Tub Time Machine’s true lineage rests with the work of star Cusack, who has been collaborating with director Steve Pink since the mid 1990s (they shared screenwriting duties on Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity). There is a light political edge to the 80s gags – 'we had Reagan and AIDS, let’s get out of here," declares Adam in 1986 – and Cusack’s character has trouble breaking up with a girl, which is pretty much what’s been plaguing his screen alter egos for the last two decades.
Looking in the mirror upon realising it’s 1986, the three men approaching middle-age see younger versions of themselves (Nick’s hairstyle is a masterpiece of construction) and that’s what everyone else, from the drunken girls to the bullying ski patrol members, sees as well. Jacob is flickering, since he’s not supposed to be there, but the story lightly but cleverly mixes up all the usual time travel conundrums of fate and free will without ever lapsing into the theoretical. Their initial plan is to duplicate the original weekend, believing that will mollify the hot tub and its lurking repairman (Chevy Chase), but opportunity and dismay soon suggest new paths.
It is a gross-out comedy with a smidgeon of intelligence and purpose. So while it has a scene where a squirrel is flung across the room by a fearsome projectile vomit, that same squirrel later reappears to offer up a new variant on the butterfly effect. The purging is from Lou, who spends much of the film venting in one way or another. Corddry, a former correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has transported the idea of a splenetic American buffoon to new heights – he takes the offensiveness of Will Ferrell’s privileged idiots and really runs with it. He, along with co-stars who never quite wink at the audience, helps shape an amusing comedy that actually exceeds the genre’s low expectations.
