‘Hot Tub’: Yep, as stupid as you think by Craig D. Lindsey

via NewsObserver

As far as time travel yarns go, “Hot Tub Time Machine” has to be one of the weakest ones I’ve ever seen. It’s even weaker than those “Austin Powers” sequels in which Mike Myers kept bouncing back-and-forth in time, breaking every rule of time-travel continuity just so he can say “Yeah, baby!” in different decades.

“Machine” revolves around a trio of buddies: the recently dumped Adam (producer John Cusack), whipped dog groomer Nick (Craig Robinson) and loutish loser Lou (Rob Corddry), who might or might not have tried to kill himself in his garage. Disillusioned with their adult lives and estranged from one another, the boys, along with Adam’s introverted nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), travel to their old teenage hangout – ski resort town Kodiak Valley – to party like they used to.

Thanks to the malfunctioning, titular mode of time travel, which they hop into during a hedonistic night of binge drinking, they get sent back to a crazy weekend they spent in 1986. Once they’re there, they attempt to relive the events that took place, not screw up the natural, presumably predetermined order of their lives.

“Machine” is a winking compendium of time-travel clichés, even making references to “Timecop,” “The Butterfly Effect” and “The Terminator.” It also casts Crispin Glover – Marty McFly’s dad himself – as a potentially deformed bellhop. And yet, the movie makes no effort to make its own time-hopping premise at least remotely logical. The movie’s concept of time travel is so flagrantly full of holes (when these guys travel back in time, they quantum-leap into their younger selves, with Duke’s not-yet-born character flickering in-and-out like a TV signal), I feel kinda silly for complaining about it. After all, this isn’t “Lost.”

The movie seems to exist just to make a bunch of raunchy gags, many of them, I have to say, quite funny. (Most of them are delivered by Corrdry, who really lets it all hang out – literally. I’ve never seen a man get naked so quickly so much in one movie.) It appears that director Steve Pink (who collaborated with Cusack on the scripts for “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “High Fidelity”) and his crew of writers are doing their own Judd Apatow knockoff, complete with disappointed, emotionally stunted grownups, R-rated humor and the occasional bare breast.

But “Machine” is a movie that’s even more unabashed in its crudeness, from its ceaseless collection of gay and penis jokes to the cruddy look of the film itself. It’s as if Pink, who directed the equally crass, college farce “Accepted,” has directed the ’80s screwball, teen sex romp he always wanted to make and threw in the present-day, time-travel element to frame the whole thing.

In the end, “Hot Tub Time Machine” pulls off something that’s almost as impossible as going back in time: It manages to be both enjoyably and infuriatingly stupid.

craig.lindsey@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4760