DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE? *%@& YES!!!: a review of "Hot Tub Time Machine"

"HOT TUB TIME MACHINE" Directed by Steve Pink
***1/2 (three and a half stars)

Now this is what "The Hangover" should've been!!! Despite that film’s massive pillaging at the box office last summer, Director Todd Phillips’ ode to extreme male bonding (i.e. stupidity), while exerting a decent amount of comic mystery, was unfortunately a not terribly funny affair. In my original review of that film, I declared it to be “coarse, crass, and callous,” and not in a supportive way. What surprised me most about that film was not only how much I detested the three leading characters but I was also stunned that it also succumbed into the worst of creepy throwback attitudes and depictions of women. To add the proverbial insult to injury, after viewing “The Hangover” a second time, what little that had worked initially for me already didn’t hold up very well. Since the comic mystery of the missing groom-to-be and the forgotten pieces of their night of debauchery had been solved after seeing the film the first time, I could not help but to become painfully aware that the film was loaded with several slow-paced passages that limped along from one set-up to the next. It had a lack of energy to go along with its’ redundant, repetitive and much too derivative comedic depravity, which ultimately robbed the enterprise of possessing an original comedic voice.

Now let me turn you to a film which not only knows how to get the job done, it definitely possesses an original comic voice. Life long friends, Director Steve Pink and Producer John Cusack have correctly figured out how to take similar elements of the male driven vulgar comedy and give them all a fresh spin. The resulting film, “Hot Tub Time Machine,” is a raucous, riotous, extremely tasteless, volcanically puerile, and downright hysterical and surprisingly melancholy film, which bests “The Hangover” in every possible way.

The pain and ennui of middle age and lament for lost youth has already settled uncomfortably into the lives of Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson) and Lou (Rob Cordrry). Upon returning home from another miserable day of cubicle drudgery, Adam is dealt a significant blow by the departure of his live-in girlfriend, along with most of his furniture and possessions. Nick is deeply in love, yet not quite happily married as he fears his wife is cheating on him. Nick has also traded his dreams of musical fulfillment for a soulless dead-end job at ‘Sup Dawg, a canine themed pet store/animal clinic. As the film opens, Adam and Nick race to the hospital to find Lou (crudely nicknamed “The Violator” due to his hard partying nature) recovering from carbon monoxide poisoning due to drunkenly singing and playing along to his beloved Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home,” in a closed garage clouded with exhaust fumes.

Hoping to cure their ills with one more fraternal blast, the trio-along with Jacob (played by Clark Duke), Adam’s 20-ish, introverted, tech-geek nephew-decide to take a trip to the ski lodge they frequented 20 years earlier, a location which also holds their most cherished memories. However, the years have not been kind to the almost empty and dilapidated resort. Yet before the gang can descend into another round of middle aged disappointment and failure, they step into the suite’s hot tub for an evening of sudsy, alcoholic fun. After a spillage on the electronic controls, the foursome are transported-like Marty McFly in Doc Brown’s DeLorean-back to the ski lodge of their heyday: the Winterland festival weekend of 1986, the exact point in time where all of their lives took dramatic turns for the worse. Realizing their ridiculously unplanned predicament, the group is faced with the chance to either right the wrongs of their past (and risking the potential damage of the butterfly effect) or allow events to play out at they had before. Will Adam choose to break up with his gorgeous and “tight” old girlfriend Jennie (Lyndsey Fonseca), the “Great White Buffalo” of his past, all over again? Will Lou defeat Blaine the rich bully (Sebastian Stan) who once roughed him up? Will Nick chase his musical dreams once and for all? Then, there’s the completely misplaced Jacob, who wasn’t even born in 1986, who somehow runs into his younger and horny Mother (Collette Wolfe). And of course, there is the question of how they will ever find their collective way back to 2010. Perhaps that cryptic repair man, played by Chevy Chase, has all of the necessary answers…

In Rob Reiner’s immortal rockumentary parody “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), guitarist David St Hubbins (played by Michael McKean) states, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” Steve Pink and John Cusack have straddled this very thin line confidently as they dole out stupid and clever in equal amounts. While it may not function as everyone’s cup of tea, for me, it worked wonderfully and on various levels as well.

As a 1980’s pop culture satire, it succeeds in ways that the highly celebrated Adam Sandler vehicle “The Wedding Singer” (1998) just did not. I despised “The Wedding Singer” for so many reasons, most of all because it presented a 1980s I never knew and frankly didn’t exist. I lived through the 1980’s. My entire adolescence existed in the 1980s and “The Wedding Singer” seemed to have absolutely no knowledge of that time. It was an 80’s fun house where every sight and sound was depicted as a knowing pop-culture joke. It was tiresome and just not funny. In “Hot Tub Time Machine” however, we do get our fair share of leg warmers, jheri curls, pastels, Walkman cassette players and an MTV that actually showed music videos, but those images do not fuel the film as a whole. In fact, after those sight gags are presented, the 80’s references we do receive are sly and subtle nods to ‘80s movies. We are treated to many mirrored moments that are engineered to remind us of “Back To The Future” (1985), “Pretty In Pink” (1986), “Red Dawn” (1984) and even several films in which Cusack himself appeared (Try to spot the references to “Sixteen Candles” (1984), “Better Off Dead” (1985), “The Sure Thing” (1985) “ and even 1989’s “Say Anything…”). Thankfully, these are all presented without throwing a neon sign on the movie screen and pummeling the audience with easy, obvious material.

Pink wisely gives his film a rapid comic velocity. Paced like a cross between a classic screwball comedy and an underground “hellzapoppin’” mania, the jokes, sight gags, and one-liners are all hurled with unabashed glee. Even the gross–out gags, of which there may a few too many, race by, make their cheerfully nasty point and move on.

John Cusack is the perfect straight man as he is constantly attempting to wrestle some sort of control over chaotic situations. His status as an unconventional and wonderfully convincing romantic lead plays out in a few sequences where Adam strikes up a friendship with April (Lizzy Caplan), a traveling music journalist for Spin magazine, currently on the road with Poison. Cusack and Caplan have a nice, quiet mid-movie courtship sequence where he delivers a sad, grim monologue that rivals, and is possibly a nod to Phoebe Cates’ infamous “Why I hate Christmas” speech from Joe Dante’s “Gremlins” (1984).

Craig Robinson, previously seen in scene stealing smaller roles in 2008’s uneven “Pineapple Express” and “Zack And Miri Make A Porno,” continues his comedic mastery of the deadpan delivery. He raises every scene he is in effortlessly. Clarke Duke is his equal with deadpan remarks, reactions and observational humor and his sweetness is a fine counterpoint to the flailing zoo around him.

Rob Cordrry takes the role of the requisite party animal to epic proportions with his blistering performance of Lou. He is an alcoholic and walking psychopathic hellion. He is the id on cocaine with three remaining and endlessly fighting brain cells at his disposal and Cordrry attacks and embraces this role completely by letting go of any inhibitions, heading full throttle and never blinking.

I must also express how much of a pleasure it was to see Chevy Chase, reminding us all, in just a few sort scenes of why he is one of the greats. And Crispin Glover as a one-armed bellboy is just golden and the center of several brutally funny moments.

Before I go any further, I have to return to “The Hangover” for a moment as I continue to ponder just how that film went wrong for me when “Hot Tub Time Machine” was blissfully right. As I stated at the head of this review, I hated the three leading characters. These stupid, boorish men didn’t seem to know or care how stupid and boorish they actually were…and perhaps, neither did the filmmakers. The film loved these guys and their behavior, the film seemed to be arguing, was justified and deserved. For all of the mishaps and unfortunate situations, nothing really horrible happened to them. “The Hangover” was too in love with its terrible trio and by the film’s conclusion, their supreme irresponsibility was not only revered and justified, it was rewarded. Being a “Bad Boy” gave them everything they wanted, they were unchanged from the experience and why should they be as there were no real consequences?

With “Hot Tub Time Machine,” Pink, Cusack and their collaborators obviously are in love with their characters as well. But, they are knowing of their collective stupidity which enhances the comedy. Yet, it is also critical of their foibles, failures, and fears, which gives the film some dark and unexpected weight. The film has built in a knowing poignancy to the material that simultaneously lets you in on the joke and laugh at these characters as well as understanding how they became miserable middle aged men. Adam, Nick and Lou could be spiritual brothers to the sad men of Ray Romano’s excellent new series, “Men Of A Certain Age.”

Also, in some respects, “Hot Tub Time Machine” reminded me of Director Harold Ramis’ finest film, “Groundhog Day” (1993) which had Bill Murray’s misanthropic weatherman forced to eternally live the same day until he devises a way to get his house in order. “Hot Tub Time Machine” may make a sloppy conceptual mess of the space-time continuum but it has a firm hand on the wheel of time and karma, as the characters are also forced to relive various moments and failures of their lost 1986 weekend in ways that differ slightly from how they remember. Like the brilliant and dizzying concepts shown within the plotting of television’s “Lost,” some events cannot be changed and matters of fate and destiny will remain no matter what you do to change the end results. Moreover, the film is clever and smart enough to depict that their cherished youth wasn’t that much better than their middle age in the first place.

I cannot deny the pleasure of a subversive John Cusack comedy. Their “anything goes” spirit has always been infectious, whether in the aforementioned teen comedies “Better Off Dead” and “One Crazy Summer” (both written and directed by Savage Steve Holland and from 1985 and 1986, respectively), the music industry satire “Tapeheads” (1988) or even Cusack’s own polarizing, raging political satire and passion project, “War, Inc.” (2008).

I have to say that I have never had a desire to return to the 80’s, a decade Cusack’s character Adam refers to glumly as “the time of Reagan and AIDS.” But, with “Hot Tub Time Machine,” I am already looking forward to a return trip.