Time-travel is wasted on this bunch
Cinema
Daniel Carey
THERE’S a great scene in ‘Back To The Future Part III’ where Doc Brown tells a bunch of customers in a 19th century saloon about what life will entail 100 years hence.
“In the future, we don’t need horses – we have motorised carriages, called automobiles”, he explains.“If everybody’s got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody walk or run anymore?” one old-timer wonders aloud. “Of course we run, but for recreation, for fun,” Doc clarifies. “Run for fun?” the senior citizen asks incredulously. “What the hell kind of fun is that?”
Twenty years after it ended, the ‘Back To The Future’ trilogy is still top-notch entertainment. ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ is being described as ‘Back To The Future’ meets ‘The Hangover’. Sadly, however, it’s not as funny as the latter, nor nowhere near as durable as the former.
‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ does fall into the ‘Snakes On A Plane’ category – it does exactly what is says on the tin. Where Doc Brown and Marty McFly used a DeLorean to get from time zone to time zone, the four main characters in Steve Pink’s new film find themselves back in 1986 courtesy of a Jacuzzi.
We open in the present day, where Adam (John Cusack) has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Nick (Craig Robinson), once the lead singer in a band, now works at a pet grooming store called Sup Dawg (say it out loud, as a greeting). Lou (Rob Corddry) has reached the end of his tether and wants to end it all.
After Rob’s suicide attempt fails, the three friends decide to embark on a weekend away. Adam brings along his nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), who rarely leaves his basement. They head for a resort in which they once spent a wild weekend, but it’s in a state of disrepair. A spell in the hot tub drinking the Russian equivalent of Red Bull changes everything, however.
All of a sudden, they’re back in the era of ‘Reagan and Aids’, as Adam surmises. Crispin Glover, who played George McFly in the ‘Back To The Future’ series, pops up as Phil, a grumpy porter who had both arms in 1986 but lost one along the way. “What – he’s exempt from common courtesy ’cause he can’t start a round of applause?” Lou asks, in the best line of a script too often centred on vulgarity and vomiting. The question of how Phil ended up as a one-armed man provides many of the flick’s funniest moments.
Chevy Chase, a 1980s superstar, pops up as a mystical hot tub repair man. The guys try to heed his warning to retrace their footsteps exactly, for fear of ‘the butterfly effect’. There are movie references by the dozen, they merely underline just how much is ripped off from other pictures. One of the better sequences centres on betting in sport, which was done by Biff Tannon in ‘Back To The Future Part II’.
References to e-mail and texting prove unsurprisingly confusing for the ’ 80s kids our heroes hang out with, and there’s a spectacularly unfunny scene where Nick rings his wife-to-be (who’s nine years old in 1986) warning her against future infidelity.
With leg-warmers, big hair and cassette players, the 1980s certainly offers rich pickings for satire. But too often, ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ goes for the cheap shot. After the hundredth juvenile joke, it felt like ‘Groundhog Day’. But ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ is nowhere near as good as that either. Is it just me, or are time-twisters just not they used to be?
Rating 4 out of 10
