Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Hot Tub Time Machine arrives from 2010 with a premise that reads like a dare: four men, one hot tub, one ill-advised energy drink, and a hard reset to 1986. Steve Pink directs with the enthusiasm of a man handed a snowmobile and no supervision. John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke make up the quartet, and the arrangement of that cast is the film's quietest concession to the modern era. Robinson occupies a lead chair in a mainstream studio comedy, and the screenplay treats the fact as unremarkable, which is its own small achievement. Nothing else about the film reaches for anything.

The 1986 setting offers exactly one moment of cultural self-awareness. Nick, played by Robinson, registers the discomfort of being a Black man in a decade he did not choose to visit, and the film makes a joke of it before moving on to the next gag. That is the entire inventory. The comedy runs on arrested development, casual misogyny, and a running panic about male tenderness that critics identified at the time. Female characters exist to be seduced, dumped, or impregnated. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where the film stops to instruct its audience on how to behave. It wants to be a screwball farce, and it mostly is one.

The final act is where the film reveals its actual theology. Lou stays behind in the past, invests with foreknowledge, and returns to 2010 as the founder of a search empire. The others inherit happy marriages and comfortable careers. Wealth creation is the reward for temporal cheating, and nobody in the film finds this troubling. It is a comedy about four men learning that the past is a portfolio. Crude, efficient, and entirely without a message. The hot tub, at least, holds up its end of the bargain, which is more than we can say for the sequel that followed five years later and made less in its entire run than this one did in a single weekend.

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