Hot Tub Time Machine

The title says it all. Well, sort of. What else could a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine be about other than a hot tub that doubles as a time machine? Evidently, not much. That is the premise and that is the focus from beginning to end. But the thing at the sweet, chewy centre of this funny comedy that makes it so comfortably endearing is the Time of the title. To be exact, this Hot Tub Time Machine is all about the intoxicating charm of the wildly colourful decade that gave us big hair, leg warmers, and ALF.

The movie's adoring obsession with the 80s fuels the comedy and drives the narrative. It's a big, silly tribute to all things big and silly from that decade and it works because it is both funny and nonsensically nostalgic. It finds great enjoyment in spoofing the already much-parodied 80s, but it does so with a loving sense of raunchy respect. It's both an insult and a commendation all at once.

The movie's other strength is the quirky cast. Everyone seems to be on the same page and they all embrace the wacky madness with goofy gusto. John Cusack, Craig Robinson, and Rob Corddry play Adam, Nick, and Lou, three buddies who used to do everything together, but now spend the majority of their time ignoring each other. When a failed suicide attempt sends Corddry's Lou to the hospital, Adam and Nick feel obligated to take their hapless, hopeless pal away for a fun-filled weekend in Kodiak Valley, the ski resort that used to play home to their wildest weekends.

Also tagging along, rather reluctantly, is Adam's basement-dwelling nephew Jacob (Clark Duke). A stranger to the partying ways of Adam and his buddies, Jacob is quickly thrust into a role of responsibility. He is the voice of reason, which basically means he's left to panic while the other guys are letting loose. But even then, he can still match the confident, vulgar sense of humour shared by the trio of middle-aged men who are looking to recapture the drunken energy of their youth.

It takes a few moments for the guys to settle into their newly decrepit surroundings (turns out Kodiak Valley is now a ghost town), but once they commence partying together in a hot tub, recapturing their youth is exactly what occurs. They awake the next morning to discover they've travelled back in time to 1986. During one of the movie's most enjoyable moments, the boys awkwardly identify the current era when they stumble into the ski lodge and spot a Miami Vice shirt, a walkman, a man sporting a Jheri curl, and Ronald Reagan delivering a presidential address on television.

This sequence sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It's all 80s, all the time. The comedy comes from the homage to the decade and it exists entirely within the confines of whatever limitations such an homage inevitably inspires. Due to the willingness of the cast to play with the crazy antics that comprise most of the scenes, Hot Tub Time Machine succeeds as a fun little comedy. Some of the jokes fizzle and the 80s-related observations represent nothing new, but the movie communicates its jokes and themes with such honesty that it becomes difficult to ignore this Time Machine's friendly charm.

Sensing that the plot will only survive in the realm of ridiculously absurd fantasy, writers Josh Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris make little effort to explain the magical, time-bending properties of the hot tub. They do shoe-horn a repairman character into the narrative as an attempt to provide a mildly cryptic explanation, but since the whole 'hot tub as time machine' premise is treated with all of the preposterousness it deserves, the repairman's presence just feels lamely uninteresting. The fact that the character is played by Chevy Chase, whose best comedic days were in the 80s, is momentarily exciting, until it is sadly revealed that his comic talents are completely wasted.

But these are ultimately a handful of nitpicks in a fistful of enjoyable silliness. At its core, the concept may border on idiotic, but what the cast, the writers, and director Steve Pink do with the concept makes the movie worth watching and easy to laugh along with. The theme of male bonding and how it changes with age is also nicely handled, mainly because the cast are a bunch of lovable guys with both a grand sense of comedic craziness and a heavy dose of world-weary weakness that makes their adventure quite believable in the context of youth and adulthood.

Bathing in nutty nostalgia and vicarious vulgarity, Hot Tub Time Machine is never more than the sum of its parts. But the joy is that those parts are quite a lot of fun. Like the premise, they're silly and ridiculous, but they're also charming in their open and honest desire to please. After all, it's hard not to be entertained by a movie whose chief antagonist pits himself against the protagonists based on his invention of a dastardly plot borrowed from the cheesy, deeply patriotic 80s action-drama Red Dawn. That kind of inspired pop culture referencing is a sign of a comedy movie hitting its mark. Hot Tub Time Machine really is about a hot tub time machine. No more, no less. Sometimes, in certain cases, that's just enough.