Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015)

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 arrives five years after its predecessor, which is roughly the interval required for a studio to forget why anyone liked the first one. Steve Pink returns to direct. John Cusack does not return, except in an unrated cut that exists to be sold separately. The plot sends Lou, Nick, and Jacob ten years forward to solve a shooting, and the film spends its running time on game shows, hallucinogens, and a suicide attempt played for uplift. It grossed thirteen million dollars against a budget of fourteen to eighteen. The Golden Raspberry voters noticed. So did everyone else.

The cast includes Craig Robinson and Kumail Nanjiani, and the film asks them to do nothing with that fact. Their presence is a payroll decision, not a statement. The virtual reality sequence at the center of the Choozy Doozy game show exists so that a man can be humiliated by the prospect of sex with another man, and the joke lands exactly where the filmmakers aimed it. GLAAD called the film out for offensive depictions. Variety reached for the words homophobic and misogynistic in the same sentence, which is efficient. Women here are wives, conquests, or plot devices who sleep with the wrong man to move the third act along.

There is a billionaire in the film, and he runs a company called Lougle, and he acquired his fortune through theft. The screenplay regards this as a triumph. Wealth is the reward for being loud. No environmental thought intrudes on the futuristic setting, which is rendered as a vending machine of gadgets. The closing gag puts a man in a minuteman costume and invites the audience to make America happen, and the line is a punchline, not a platform. This is a film with no sermon to deliver, no consciousness to raise, and no interest in anything beyond the next bodily function. On the scale that concerns us, it registers as a near-total absence.