“Hot Tub Time Machine” is a movie about the slow recognition that life is better remembered than lived. The movie is about how three men look back with longing to a time in their youth when they had everything, only to realize that the winter of 1986 is just as disappointing as the present day. To be fair, though, this is also one of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time.
The movie is a high-wire balancing act between going too far and not far enough. Much of this rests on the shoulders of Rob Corddry, whose performance is a fearless penetration into his own arrested development, using it to mask his own self-contempt.
When his character Lou has what he says isn’t a suicide attempt, his long time but absent best friends Adam (John Cusack) and Nick (Craig Robinson) decide they should go to their old stomping grounds where they all seem to remember with fondness how they were once stallions on the prowl. Accompanying them is Adam’s nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), who is the text messaging and Second Life generation’s ambassador.
The boys start drinking in their mountain hot tub, and the next thing they know, they wake up in 1986. Logistics don’t matter in this type of movie. They get into a hot tub, and it happens to be a time machine. Each vows to try and do exactly as they did twenty years ago while Jacob runs around trying to make sure that no one deviates so that he can be born.
The night progresses, and the men realize that the future holds nothing but empty promises, piles of regrets and a friendship lost.
At 93 minutes, the movie doesn’t skip a beat, and barely pauses to let you catch up to it. The comedy moves at breakneck speed with dialogue that is deeply funny while simultaneously perceptive of the nature of male immaturity. This is a brand all by its lonesome. This isn’t an Apatow knock-off with second-hand jokes, but a movie that builds a rhythm by itself.
Much of the pleasure comes from the leads. Of course, Corddry garners laugh after laugh, but Robinson, Cusack and Duke all squeeze every available joke out. Cusack is an ’80s icon to his own degree, and there isn’t a better actor out there for capturing a narcissistic and broken pillar of baggage that is a recovering romantic. Robinson, who could squeeze laughs out of the encyclopedia, shows Nick as a man who settled, needing someone to cling to other than himself when his life went south. Duke, who has little to work with, captures being lost in a world his character only has read about.
The movie is in the same vein as a comedy like “The Hangover.” That movie, though it is good, lets the characters off the hook. “The Hangover” gets soft in the end, but Steve Pink never quite goes there. He takes it somewhere a little bit darker and, for my money, a lot funnier. It does supply a happy ending, but even that has a tone that seems a bit more elegiac. It doesn’t go down with ease like most comedies.
In Hemingway’s best book, “The Sun Also Rises,” he wrote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” “Hot Tub Time Machine” is wise in being able to admit this. We all grow older and in this act we will think with fondness of certain chapters of our lives whether or not that is how it all happened. What the movie recognizes, with constant laughter, is that life can surprise you and underwhelm you. That doesn’t mean you have to underwhelm yourself, though.
***1/2 stars out of ****
Bottom Line: “Hot Tub Time Machine” is darker, deeper and, as a result, funnier than many modern comedies, and it condenses all these traits into a mere 93 minutes. In that regard, it’s reminiscent of Judd Apatow films and “The Hangover,” but it’s still unique and worth seeing for a good laugh.
