Critic's Rating: ** stars 
 
 "Hot Tub Time Machine" is a bubbling caldron of expletives, bad '80s hair and raunchy jokes. 
 
 In other words: an R-rated movie aimed at teens. 
 
 Four losers - played by John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke - go on a ski getaway to party like it's 1986 at a lodge they visited when they were teens. Unfortunately, warm memories collide with stark reality when they find the resort in shambles. 
 
 Even the hot tub, complete with a dead raccoon moldering inside, is a bust. But the tub is quickly repaired by a mysterious handyman (Chevy Chase), and the night that follows is filled with excessive partying - until a spilled beverage shorts out the thermostat and sends everyone back to 1986, including Duke's character, who wasn't even born yet. 
 
 Lots of strange stuff occurs as the crew tries to find the way back to 2010, with not-so-hilarious results. There are beat-downs, random sex, vomiting and just a bit of romance, as the quartet set out to regain what they think they've lost since those days of their misspent youth. 
 
 You've seen Corddry before, but always in a minor role, in such movies as "Blades of Glory," "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and "What Happens in Vegas." This time, the actor is off the leash and chewing scenery as if there's no tomorrow. He's responsible for the nastiest bits in the film, but his exuberance gives him an odd charm. He forces the rest of the actors into the background. 
 
 It's sad to see Cusack, who appeared in several sweet, iconic '80s teen hits such as "The Sure Thing" and "Say Anything . . . " in this role. And although his subtle, wry humor is evident in a few scenes, the rest of the laughs are pretty childish. And since he's one of the producers, he's not blameless. 
 
 Chase wanders on and off the set as if he's confused to be making a movie that doesn't have "Vacation" in the title. He's given little to do - and no laughs. 
 
 "Hot Tub Time Machine" proves that just because you have the power and money to make a movie, it doesn't mean you should. 
 
 Hot Tub Time Machine ** 
 
 Cast: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Chevy Chase, Crispin Glover, Lizzy Caplan, Sebastian Stan, Lyndsy Fonseca, Collette Wolfe, Charlie McDermott, Kellee Stewart, Julia Maxwell 
 
 Behind the scenes: Produced by John Cusack, Grace Loh and Matt Moore. Written by Josh Heald, Sean Anders and John Morris. Directed by Steve Pink. 
 
 Rated: R; crude humor, sex, nudity, drugs, alcohol, pervasive language 
 
 Approximate running time: 93 minutes ||||| After you've seen Hot Tub Time Machine, take a warm, bubbly dip in our Spoiler Special discussion: 
 
 
 
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 I am genuinely saddened not to have enjoyed Hot Tub Time Machine (MGM Pictures). The title is so genius! My standards were so low! All this movie needed to make me laugh were four guys in a Jacuzzi, a fuchsia/turquoise color palette, a steady stream of dumb jokes, and a little bit of heart. Unfortunately, the missing ingredient is the last. 
 
 HTTM's comedy credentials are solid, if not distinguished. The movie was directed by Steve Pink, an old comrade of John Cusack's who co-wrote High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank. It stars '80s icon and perennial cutie-pie Cusack, The Office star and Apatow stalwart Craig Robinson, and Rob Corddry, arguably the funniest Daily Show correspondent of all time. And it boasts one of those how-can-you-not-see-this conceptual titles that doubles as its own ready-made marketing campaign. (After Snakes on a Plane came out in 2006, Slate held a reader contest to come up with the best such title; you can read the gloriously stupid results here.) 
 
 Cusack, Robinson, and Corddry play three middle-aged friends who've become semi-estranged thanks to the small failures and disillusionments of adult life. These once-inseparable party animals now avoid each other's calls. Adam (Cusack) is an insurance salesman who's just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nick (Robinson) is a dog groomer, at a salon called 'Sup, Dawg?, who's undergone the apparently emasculating humiliation of being forced to hyphenate his name with his wife's. And Lou (Corddry) is a divorced, alcoholic loser who lands in the hospital after what looks like a suicide attempt (but is actually just non-goal-oriented self-destructive behavior). To cheer their pal up, Nick and Adam decide to take him on a road trip to Kodiak Valley, a ski resort where the guys spent a legendarily wild weekend 20 years before. Along for the ride is Adam's nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), a chubby 20-year-old gaming addict who for vaguely explained reasons has been living in his uncle's basement. 
 
 Their hotel in Kodiak Valley turns out to be a near-deserted dump with a surly one-armed bellhop (Crispin Glover) and a dead raccoon floating in the near-empty hot tub. The guys complain to management, and a strange, enigma-spouting repairman (Chevy Chase) comes to clean and fill the tub. After a long night of tub-bound partying, they awake to find themselves in a strangely rejuvenated resort, packed with teenagers in padded-shoulder jackets and gelled asymmetrical hairdos. Poison is booked to play a gig that night, Ronald Reagan's on the TV in the lounge … in short, it's 1986 again, and the only way the boys can get back to the future is by re-enacting the exact events that took place that same night two decades ago. 
 
 With a premise this perfect, the movie should have written itself. Time-travel capers have it all: built-in suspense (we've got to find a way out of here!), jokes (dated customs are funny!), and sentiment (growing up is tough! the choices we make matter!). But Hot Tub Time Machine seems almost willfully to squander every opportunity for greatness or even sort-of-goodness. Instead of exploring the cosmic laws of this particular temporal universe—why must they re-create the actions of that long-ago night? What will happen if they don't?—the movie is content to bundle sloppily together wan jabs at '80s culture (people didn't know about texting yet? morons!) with a very 21st-century investment in maximizing audience gross-out. Every imaginable body fluid, with the possible exception of lymph, gets its own extended sight gag, none of which are clever even by post-Farrelly-brothers standards. Here, catch this dog poo! Oops, the contents of my catheter got sprayed in your face! Whoops, projectile vomit ahoy! There is one exception to the low bar this movie sets for body comedy: A running gag involving the inevitable but perpetually deferred severing of Crispin Glover's arm is worthy of a real dumb '80s comedy. (One effect of HTTM's feeble script is to make Better Off Dead, a cult Cusack vehicle that's referenced here, seem as worthy of cinematic nostalgia as Tootsie.) 
 
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 HTTM also trucks heavily in misogyny and homosexual panic of the sort that's retro in a not-cute way. A key scene—one that clearly regards itself as an outrageous high point—has Corddry's character losing a bet and being urged to fellate his buddy Nick at gunpoint as a crowd of onlookers chants "Suck! Suck! Suck!" (I feel like washing my hands even typing this description, but that's what happens.) Even the presence of Karate Kid bad guy William Zabka as the sadistic winner of the bet can't erase the bad taste left by a scene that mines mob violence and coerced sexual assault for laughs. 
 
 There are other, smaller problems with Hot Tub Time Machine: Clark Duke feels miscast as the youngest member of the cohort, and a conceit whereby the principals are played by younger actors whenever they see themselves in a mirror falls flat. But quibbles like these wouldn't matter if the movie's raunchy nonsense were animated by a spirit of generosity. Instead, even the scenes in which the four friends are ostensibly bonding seethe with hostility and aggression. It says a lot that this film's biggest laugh comes from a simple utterance of its title, spoken early on by Craig Robinson in a deadpan direct address to the camera, as he recognizes the nature of his predicament. As if in unintended tribute to the movie's time-travel theme, the best part of Hot Tub Time Machine may be the moment just before it begins, when the title flashes on-screen to a round of audience applause. 
 
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 "This Time Has Little To Show" 
 
 The question is not whether or not the new comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine” is idiotic or not--with what is easily the most absurdly on-the-nose title to hit multiplexes since “Snakes on a Plane,” how could it not be? No, the question here revolves around what particular brand of idiocy it is serving up--is it the kind of smartly conceived idiocy that gets its laughs from offering up an ironic point-of-view to the absurd silliness on display or is it the kind of deliberately dumb idiocy that gets it laughs from its crudely straightforward approach to the absurd silliness on display? In this particular case, either approach might have worked but the problem is that the filmmakers are never quite sure about which one to take and so have instead chosen to alternate between the two almost at random. The result is a film that contains some big laughs here and there but which is finally brought down by the inescapable fact that it is neither as smart as it thinks it is nor as dumb. As the film opens, long-separated high-school pals Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson) and Lou (Rob Corddry) are unexpectedly reunited when the latter is rushed to the hospital after either attempting suicide over of the failure that his life has become or simply doing something incredibly idiotic. Put in charge of keeping an eye on him for the next few days and feeling bummed out about how their respective lives have turned out, Adam and Nick decide to cheer themselves and Lou up with an impromptu visit to the ski resort that was the location of an especially memorable weekend in order to recapture the hedonistic spirit of their long-passed youth. When the three arrive, with Adam geeky nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) in tow, they discover that the icy Babylon of long ago is now a frozen crap-shack with live animals in the lobby, a dead one in their room’s hot tub and a one-armed bellboy (Crispin Glover) slinging the bags around. More despondent than before, the guys are about to leave when they discover that the hot tub has miraculously snapped back into workable condition and spend a booze-soaked night carousing in it. When they wake up the next morning, they are surprised to find that the resort is now bustling with activity and are even more amazed to discover that their fellow skiers are decked out in Day-Glo fashions and feathered hair, the hills are alive with the sound of Men Without Hats and Michael Jackson is still black. 
 
 
 
 As most of you have no doubt figured out by this point, the unlikely combination of an in-room hot tub and the mysterious ingredients of a banned Russian energy drink that gets spilled into the control panel has sent the guys back in time to 1986 to the very time of that fabled weekend. After wrestling with questions about violating the fabric of the time-space continuum (arguably the only natural fabric left on display) and listening to the advice of the mysterious hot tub repairman (Chevy Chase), who is way too enigmatic to be of much help, the guys decide that the most sensible thing to do is for each of them to exactly recreate the pivotal events of that weekend so as to avoid disrupting the future. This means that Adam must go off to break up with his girlfriend (Lyndsey Fonseca) and get a fork in the eye for his troubles, Nick must revive his long-forgotten dream of being a musical superstar and have some bathtub fun with a sexy groupie (Jessica Pare), Lou must get his ass kicked repeatedly by fascist ski patrol leader Blaine () and Jacob--well, he technically shouldn’t exist as anything other than a zygote at this point but if the film is going to overlook this point, so will I. Needless to say, things quickly go wrong and the guys are forced to deal with such obstacles as ski patrol goons, a sexy journalist (Lizzy Caplan) and their own pasts and futures in order to get back to their own time before they are forced to watch “Howard the Duck” again. 
 
 
 
 Despite the essential silliness of the concept, I went into “Hot Tub Time Machine” expecting good things, based largely on the presence of John Cusack, who largely managed to avoid appearing in the junkier teen movies of the era, and director Steve Pink, who collaborated with Cusack on such wonderful films as “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “High Fidelity” and who also directed the perceptive and very funny teen comedy “Accepted.” With the two of them taking point, my hope was that it would be more in the vein of such smart and sardonic youth-oriented films of the era as “Repo Man” and “Better Off Dead” (which does rate a shout-out here), films that had the requisite amount of heaving breasts, bodily fluids and things blowing up but which were more than just the usual mindless junk that constituted most teen movies of the time. Instead, it quickly becomes clear that the film is more in tune with the dumber films of the era--the plot is essentially a mixture of the idiotic jiggle-fest “Hot Dog: The Movie” and the garish John Hughes gumdrop “Weird Science” with chunks of “Back to the Future” as a garnish. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea if there was some kind of point to the proceedings--perhaps an exploration of the ways that contemporary popular culture has evolved/devolved in the last quarter-century and the ways in which it has stayed the same. Instead, the film is largely content to skip anything that complex and instead rely on obvious jokes involving wacky fashions, pop culture references and cameo appearances from familiar faces of the era like Chase, Glover and the immortal William Zabka. This is bad enough because most of these moments are flubbed (the Zabka appearance is so badly handled that someone had to explain to me where he turned up the day after the screening) but it becomes even worse when you consider all the possibilities that are squandered here. For example, while I admire “Back to the Future” as much as most people, there are two things about it that have always bothered me--the joke about how Chuck Berry’s sound was lifted from a pasty white teenage and the Reagan-era fantasy finale that suggested that the hero’s family was now happy and well-adjusted because they were rich. Both of these elements pop up in “Hot Tub Time Machine” as well but instead of giving them well-deserved skewering, it is content to simply repeat the gags without even a shred of irony or comment. 
 
 
 
 Granted, a film entitled “Hot Tub Time Machine” is perhaps not the place to go to in order to look for social and satirical commentary but even if one is willing to forgive it on that particular level, the rest of it is still pretty much a mess throughout. While I appreciate the fact that the screenplay doesn’t waste a lot of time dwelling on the minutiae of the time-travel paradox, it is amazingly lazy in other areas even by the admittedly loose standards of the admittedly scattershot films that it is trying to invoke. There are gigantic plot holes everywhere that make an already senseless story even more so--the dawning romance between Adam and the journalist is exceptionally odd when you consider that she is presumably in her mid-late 20’s and he, to everyone’s eyes but ours, is supposed to be maybe 18 tops. There is no real sense of urgency to the proceedings and it is never clear exactly what will happen to our heroes if they don’t make it back to their own time and there never seem to be any long-term ramifications to the various ways in which they mess with their timelines, which is a bit of a bummer since one of the few times that they do this--a bit involving a famous bit of sports history that doesn’t go quite as planned--is one of the funniest moments in the film. Worst of all, the film really hits the gross-out humor and homophobic jokes pretty hard throughout to the point of being borderline offensive. I am sure that Pink, Cusack and company will argue that they have included such things to serve as ironic commentary on the kind of humor that used to pop up in films of this time without ever raising an eyebrow but as they painfully prove here, the line between a straightforward sight gag involving dog poop and an ironic sight gag involving dog poop is one that is apparently too thin for them to properly negotiate. “Hot Tub Time Machine” isn’t completely without merit. There are some hilarious bits scattered throughout (my favorites include Nick’s anguished call to his unfaithful wife and the running gag involving the bellboy’s constantly imperiled limb), the performances from Cusack and Richardson find a nice deadpan tone that plays well against the absurdity of their surroundings (the less said about the overdone contributions of Coddry and Duncan, the better) and whatever its other artistic sins, it never quite sinks to the unholy depths of “The Hangover.” I can even see the possibility of watching a few minutes of it sometime in the future if I came across it late at night on cable, at least up to the point of Jessica Pare’s appearance. For the most part, however, it is pretty much a mess and not even a particularly interesting one at that, My guess is that if hot tub time machines actually did exist, most viewers would use them immediately after watching this film in order to go back in time and pick a better movie to see. 
 
 
 
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 originally posted: 03/26/10 16:00:00 
 
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 ||||| C Lowest Recommended Age: Adult MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong crude and sexual content, nudity, drug use and pervasive language Profanity: Extremely strong and crude language Nudity/Sex: Very explicit sexual references and graphic situations, female nudity Alcohol/Drugs: Drinking, drug use, intoxication Violence/Scariness: Comic peril and violence, some graphic and bloody, suicide attempt Diversity Issues: Broadly offensive humor, sexism, homophobia Movie Release Date: March 26, 2010 
 
 I can understand why John Cusack, producer and star of this movie, would like to find a time machine to take him back to 1986. That was the last time he was making popular movies. 
 
 With the most explanatory title since "Snakes on a Plane," we know where this is going, literally. Four shlubs, unhappy with their lives, go for a ski weekend at a place where the three middle-aged friends used to live it up. The fourth member is a shlub from the next generation who has never had a chance to live it up. At the resort, they go into a hot tub and faster than you can say Spandau Ballet, they are back in 1986. Three of them have a chance to correct their mistakes and the fourth has a chance to find out something about where he came from that will surprise no one. Within the first ten minutes we see a bong, a character throwing dog poop in someone's face, and a suicide attempt. Party on! 
 
 Can you guess what happens next? Will there be jokes about cheesy 80's trends? Someone is wearing a "Miami Vice" t-shirt. Will there be jokes about things people in the 80's didn't know were coming? Someone from the 80's ask cluelessly, "What is email? Will men who never figured out how to be grown-ups go back to being kids and learn that they didn't know how to do that, either? Will there be appearances by performers from the 80's intended to make us feel nostalgic but in reality just reminding us of how old they are now? Watch for Chevy Chase and, reminding us in addition about how much worse this is than "Back to the Future," Crispin Glover. And then, just to throw everything possible into the mix, let's add some raunchy humor with a lot of cheerful sexism and homophobia. Its slacker vibe matches its era, but it's not unpretentious; it's just lazy. 
 
 It tries hard to be outrageous, but more often it's dull. Once again, and I'm just going to have to keep saying this until they get the message, referring to something is not the same as making a joke about it. And, for the record, let me add that jokes about and the appearance of bodily fluids are not inherently funny, either. On the other hand, if you disagree, you will love this movie. 
 
 The few bright spots include the always-welcome Craig Robinson and the on-the-brink-of-breaking-through Lizzy Caplan, still just one great part away from the big time. The un-bright spots include pretty much everything else. 
 
 ||||| I'm all for dumb fun. But the warmed-over Hot Tub Time Machine forgets it takes smarts to do stupid right. Just look at the comic roadkill so far this year: The Bounty Hunter, Valentine's Day, Cop Out, Tooth Fairy, When in Rome, The Spy Next Door and Our Family Wedding. And ahead is MacGruber (from an already threadbare SNL skit), Date Night (an Out-of-Towners retread Tina Fey and Steve Carell squeezed in on hiatus from their sitcoms), The Back-Up Plan (J. Lo does Knocked Up) and Death at a Funeral (a Brit farce re-spun in black by Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan). The lack of comic imagination is obvious just from the trailers. 
 
 When did Hollywood stop making an effort to come up with something even remotely original? Hot Tub Time Machine, with its baldfaced attempt to send The Hangover back to the future, illustrates the clone mechanism that's killing movie comedy. 
 
 Peter Travers reviews Hot Tub Time Machine in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies With Peter Travers." 
 
 Check the premise: how about three thirtysomething amigos — manic Lou (Rob Corddry), married Nick (Craig Robinson) and recently dumped Adam (John Cusack) — going back in time? Not in a DeLorean like in Back to the Future. That would be stealing. But in a hot tub left over from a skeevy ski lodge. And how about adding Eighties icon Chevy Chase as the tub-repair dude? For teens, you have Adam take along his nephew Jacob (Clark Duke). Why? So Jacob can meet his horny mom, just like Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly did, and play incest for yuks. To keep the Future riffs going, bring in Crispin Glover, McFly's dad, this time as a one-armed bellhop.To be fair, Glover — armed or not — is one of the film's rare, unalloyed pleasures. 
 
 Peter Travers goes Off the Cuff with Crispin Glover. 
 
 The concept is that the three guys yearn for a time when they were horny and perpetually stoned. That would be 1986, when another time-travel movie came out, Peggy Sue Got Married. It's a shamelessly borrowed setup. But it could still be fun. At least I hoped. Director Steve Pink co-scripted two of Cusack's best movies, Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. But Pink goes way too broad with the screenplay partly credited to Sean Anders and John Morris, who lift a gay-panic joke out of their own She's Out of My League. 
 
 Hot Tub Time Machine should have been better than this. It could have been poignant, with these underachievers both eager and afraid to change their lives by screwing with the space-time continuum. Cusack's dragged-in romance with Lizzy Caplan doesn't help a movie in which the gross-out joke trumps the jones to go deeper. It's a kick to watch Corddry go nuts ("Let's invent Girls Gone Wild!") and Robinson wow a 1980s crowd by singing the Black Eyed Peas. But if all that separates two generations is the iPod and the Internet, this tub is drained, leaving a movie that's fitfully funny instead of memorably so. 
 
 Get more news, reviews and interviews from Peter Travers on The Travers Take. 
 
 Audiences born after 1990 may scratch their heads at the 1980s-movie shout-outs, from Real Genius to Cusack's own Better Off Dead ("I want my $2"). And those old enough to remember two John Hughes gems from 1986, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Pretty in Pink, may wonder where the heart went. I've been told that failure to get totally in sync with Hot Tub Time Machine means you're dead inside. Wrong. That's the movie's problem.
– With a Snakes On a Plane-quality title and an all-star lineup (John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and, yes, Chevy Chase), Hot Tub Time Machine could have been a great, bad film. But critics aren't buying this "baldfaced attempt to send The Hangover back to the future." They're not even laughing: "I'm all for dumb fun", says Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. "But the warmed-over Hot Tub Time Machine forgets it takes smarts to do stupid right." The movie "seems almost wilfully to squander every opportunity for greatness or even sort-of-goodness," writes Dana Stevens for Slate. "Jokes about and the appearance of bodily fluids are not inherently funny," says Beliefnet's Nell Minnow. "On the other hand, if you disagree, you will love this movie." Hot Tub "is finally brought down by the inescapable fact that it is neither as smart as it thinks it is nor as dumb," writes Peter Sobczynski for eFlimCritic.com And, from the Journal Sentinel's Sue Pierman: "Hot Tub Time Machine proves that just because you have the power and money to make a movie, it doesn't mean you should."