We know : This Hot Tub Time Machine thing is puzzling . Is it a Hangover - style raunch - comedy ? A clip - travel epic ? A 2001 : A Space Odyssey - expressive style journey into the vortex of our deepest souls ? We do your hot , wet interrogative below . Spoilers ahead …
What ’s blistering Tub Time Machine About ?
Actually , the championship ’s pretty self - explanatory .
So it ’s about a red-hot tub … that ’s also a metre machine ?
Okay , we take it back . It ’s not self - explanatory at all . Actually , the spicy bathtub is not a time auto . Rather , it astrally projects three center - aged losers back in clip , so that they occupy the body of their younger self for a steamy ski weekend when they confronted questions of living , love and identity element . And hooey . But the fourth occupant of the hot tub , a kid named Jacob ( Clark Duke ) who was n’t bear yet in 1986 , gets physically transported back in time .
That ’s middling confusing . So it ’s only a time motorcar if you were n’t alive in 1986 ? Otherwise , it just transplants your mind backward in time into your younger self ?
That ’s right .
So I ’ve heard a lot about the fact that Crispin Glover is in this movie , in a small but all-important part . I have a vague recollection that Glover was in the Back To The Future motion picture , except for the third one , where hewas replace by a wig . So is this movie ’s storyline exchangeable to Back To The hereafter ?
https://gizmodo.com/worst-recastings-of-science-fictions-rock-star-characte-5454383
Not really . Back To The Future is the gold criterion of how to use clip traveling for sense of humor and character development , and it ’s unwise of Hot Tub Time Machine to put forward the compare . In BTTF , there ’s a unclouded storyline , where Marty McFly pay off stuck in the 1950s , where he grapples with cultivation daze and with realize the base of his dad ’s loser - hood . He unintentionally prevents his parents from hooking up , so he ’ll never be bear unless he define it — and he wants to get home to the 1980s , because he ’s clearly out of spot here .
Meanwhile , the fictitious character in Hot Tub Time Machine mostly lurch through their own past , without much being at stakes . Except for Clark Duke ’s character , who we ’re told once or twice might not be born if the timeline alteration . But there ’s never any serious worry that Duke ’s lineament wo n’t be born , except for one abbreviated moment . Until the interchange - on cease , you do n’t get the feeling that this journeying is changing them as people , and the culture - electrical shock of being in the eighties is dull because the characters are live over their own pasts . In some ways , this is like a Sweded version of Back To The Future made by hoi polloi reading the summary on the video recording box .
Okay . But I think , the three middle - cured characters are losers in the present tense . And then they travel back to the past , when they were young and awesome . So they relive their glory days and con something , right ?
Actually , they were losers when they were younger , too . They were always loser . They do amount aside with a keener cognizance of what unsuccessful person they were when they were younger . At one point late in the film , you get the sense that all three of them are dumbfound to be slightly more awesome this time around , which comes out of nowhere but is still nice to see . And there ’s that tacked - on ending I mentioned .
So they were lovable losers ?
on the dot — except not all that lovable .
John Cusack ’s in this moving-picture show too , right ? I saw John Cusack on one of the posters .
Yes , he is . He ’s doing a weird Christian Bale crushed rock - representative thing . But he ’s in it .
I seem to remember Cusack being in some pic in the 1980s . Does this riff on those ?
Not near as much as you ’d expect . There are a few fleeting moment that sense like a sendup of a John Hughes romantic clowning , but they feel like they belong to a different motion-picture show . What the film does have is a lot of small nod to 1980s pop civilization , like one minor quality being ghost with Red Dawn , and there ’s lots of 1980s music and fashions , and Ronald Reagan is arbitrarily contribute a speech live on television . The 1980s affair is mostly a backdrop for the fairly timeless activeness , except that the minor fictitious character who ’s obsessed with Red Dawn is also paranoid about the Russians .
So waitress , back up to the part where they ’re in the body of their younger self . So they get to be young again — except that they remember everything that happened to them since 1986 ? They get to relive their bloom of animation a second clock time ? That sounds like a pretty angelical deal . Right ?
It is a nice deal — except that for some reason they think they want to devolve to the present , so they can be stuck as middle - aged nonstarter again . It ’s not ever really clean why , except that Chevy Chase plays a cryptic hot tub repairman , whose confusing utterance could mean that there ’ll be defective consequences if these meter travelers alter their own history . ( Or not , possibly . ) And Clark Duke ’s nerdy character chew out them about not changing story , but they do n’t really pay attention to him . ( And his upright logical argument is that if they change events in the eighties , Hitler will be chairperson . That ’s one of the cinema ’s really funny business . )
Weirdly , at times , the characters spill about being young again as if it were this terrible burden that they ’re hear to escape from . It ’s sort of flakey . At best , they ’re sort of apathetic about the whole thing , except for the very end .
Is Rob Corddry laughable in this ?
Yeah , he ’s by all odds the good thing in it . He ’s the biggest shmuck of the group , and he throws himself into it with insane gusto , setting himself up for punishment again and again through his insane schmuckiness . Really , the whole movie stands and falls based on how much you enjoy watching Rob Corddry being a schmuck . For the most part , it ’s fun to watch , but after an time of day or so it started to get old for me . The fourth star , Craig Robinson from The Office , has a few really cracking moments .
I really liked The Hangover . That was really funny . This is like that , right ?
The consensus of everybody I ’ve talk to who see both movies is that this is not nearly as funny as The Hangover . And The Hangover was a picture show , where this is mostly a solicitation of smash - and - miss jape string up together randomly .
Well , my standard are quite downcast , so that ’s o.k. . Are there tidy sum of boobs in this motion-picture show ? It ’s universal gas constant - scab , right ?
There are a dyad of brief instant where you see boob . There are n’t really any memorable women in this movie , except Cusack ’s erotic love sake , who ’s not in it very much . It ’s hard to have boobs when you do n’t have women . This is by all odds a flick about virile soldering . Between guy cable who do n’t care each other that much .
I do n’t really care about boobs anyway . What about bodily fluid ? Does this film have those ?
Yes , although inquisitively there ’s no snoot . We were marvel afterwards why that was . Every few second , somebody gets splash passably reliably with poop , projectile puke , weewee , origin and semen ( although the semen turns out to be fake . ) But no prig . Why is there no snoot ? Was there some kind of anti - snot discimination at workplace here ? The only matter we could consider of was that the snot will probably be on the videodisk . As a deleted tantrum . Or perchance it ’ll just be on the videodisk , so it fix on your hand when you put it in your player .
So it sounds like you did n’t like this movie that much . What gives ?
I know . And usually , I love dumb funniness . And gross - out humor . Maybe this one just got me on a spoiled day . If it helps , Roger Ebert , who is a living god , love it . I would take Roger Ebert ’s opinion over mine , any daylight .
So why did n’t you care it , exactly ? Are you just anti - projectile nauseant ?
No qualms about the projectile vomit here . I think it ’s because I did n’t like the characters — mostly because the motion-picture show separate me over and over that I should n’t like the characters . ( Cusack says over and over that he ’s self - absorbed , which is the only sign we ever see of his ego - absorption . ) Comedy about unlikable people is hard to rip off — Steve Coogan does it brightly , and so do a few other comedian , but it ’s a tricky one . And I just did n’t think the drollery was unbalanced enough to overcome how much I disliked these hoi polloi .
Also , I really , really have intercourse sentence - travel clowning . It ’s not exactly a capacious writing style , and there are really only a handful of Harlan Fiske Stone classics . BTTF is one , Bill And Ted is another . Time - travel comedy is even trickier than funniness about unlikable people . But when it works , it ’s beyond magic trick . It has the fish - out - of - water thing , the judgement - crouch brain-teaser affair , the escapist thing of being able to untangle the tyrrany of the irrevocable , and most of all the almost - limitless slapstick potential of someone traipse around the wrong decade and making an sinful hole . I freakin love time - travel comedies . Except when they ’re sloppy , gimmicky and a bit wearisome . Then I hate them .
Wait , I still have more doubtfulness .
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