My notes on the Hot Tub Time Machine mini-franchise.Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
That there is now a time travel/nostalgia film which zips back to the decade in which Back to the Future was made is guaranteed to make people like me feel old. And this one even has Crispin Glover in it, looking bizarrely unchanged, to rub it in. With a lot of background work going into décor (a poster for White Knights), hairstyles and ski outfits (hideous, with headbands), this has a fondness for a decade which even those who were young in it felt was pretty crappy – when the junior member of the time-trip quartet looks forward to the drugs and free love, he is abruptly told that he’s thinking of the 1960s and ‘all we had was AIDS and Reagan’.
It opens in 2010 by establishing that the future world-beaters of 1986 are what passes for losers in a mainstream American film – Adam (John Cusack) sells insurance, has just been dumped by his girlfriend and has his net-junkie slacker nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) living in his basement, Nick (Craig Robinson) works at a mall vet called ‘Sup Dawg’ and is hen-pecked enough to incorporate his cheating wife’s name into his own, and Lou (Rob Corddry) is an angry bald asshole who has just been fired again and only gets his oldest friends to visit by attempting an inept suicide. With Jacob tagging along, the trio revisit the ski resort where they had teen movie gross-out type adventures – more in like with ‘80s items like The Party Animal, Hotbodies and Bachelor Party than ‘80s Cusack vehicles like The Sure Thing or Say Anything – only to find that it’s as faded and derelict as their lives. But a don’t-think-about-it contrivance with the hot tub, an irradiated Russian soft drink and a swirly effect sends all four back to 1986, where they see their younger selves in the mirror – except for Jacob, who fades in and out of existence since his whole life is now provisional – and have to live through a busy day of well-remembered crises (Adam getting stabbed in the eye with a fork for dumping his college girlfriend, Lou getting beaten up by asshole ski patrols led by someone who looks like the villain of Karate Kid II, Nick performing with his band before giving up on a music career) before an enigmatic fixer (Chevy Chase) can get the hot tub working again and send them back to the future.
For a reel or so, they vow not to change the past – ‘you’ll make Hitler president’ – and discuss The Butterfly Effect (the movie and the effect), but when Adam hesitates in the crucial scene with his perky ‘80s g.f. (Lyndsey Fonseca) she dumps him instead and he still gets stabbed with the fork. Oddly, no one mentions the end of Back to the Future, since that’s plainly where we’re headed as the dolts fumble their way towards changing their lives for the better or just at random: Adam by hooking up with an awesome woman (Lizzy Caplan), who anachronistically introduces herself with ‘I’m awesome’ (though, to be fair, Caplan is), Nick by telephoning his nine-year-old future wife and explicitly haranguing her for being a future slut, and Lou solves a long-standing mystery about Jacob’s paternity by having sex with Adam’s sparkly sister (Collette Wolfe) lingering in the past with all his foreknowledge (just like in The Final Countdown) so he can profit from inventing internet search engine Lougle and a rock star period with Motley Lüe (there’s no thought for the successful folk of our timeline who get ripped off without ever knowing it and presumably languish in obscurity just so an obnoxious jerk can be a billionaire). The tone is as crass and gross as its ‘80s models or recent slob comedies – a highlight is Lou puking on a squirrel, and there’s a routine where Nick is duped into believing he’s come on Lou’s face – and (Caplan aside) all the women are brainless sluts (hey, even Losin’ It had Shelley Long and Diner had Ellen Barkin). However, this passes the basic test for a comedy: it’s mostly funny, and the characters are inherently appealing enough – even patience-testing jerk Lou – to get past the duff stretches. As in the ‘80s, no time travel comedy can do without a Ronald Reagan joke, but this also has a quotient of contemporary gags about ‘80s primitives who don’t know anything of this email, texting or the internet you speak of (like, why would the time travelers expect any different?). Scripted by Josh Heald and Sean Anders & John Morris; directed by Steve Pink.
Hot Tub Time Machine2 (2015)
Five years on and the gang are back in the HTTM take on Back to the Future Part 2, with the significant difference that John Cusack bailed out – he doesn’t even cameo – so we’re left with his comedy sidekicks and a substitute, Adam Scott as the Cusack character’s son, who is the butt (literally) of jokes rather than a leading man. Also, by zipping from the timeline-altered present of the end of the first film ten years into a future with murderous self-driving cars and VR humiliation TV shows hosted by Christian Slater the baseline harkback to ‘80s teen comedies is out the window. Which leaves just Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke acting like complete assholes for an hour and a half – a running joke which soon runs down has Lou (Corddry) try to excuse inexcusable behaviour by saying ‘only joking’, but the film’s real stratagem is to skip over a bunch of appalling business with these hateful folks and try to lob a pathos-byte which asks us to sympathise with their self-pity. It doesn’t work that way. It does pick up on one omission I noted in the first film – in the altered timeline, Lou and Nick (Robinson) have become rich by pretending to have other people’s ideas (inventing ‘Lougle’) or writing other people’s songs … and here Lisa Loeb does pop up as a cat-wrangler wondering why Nick’s cover of a song she has no longer written seems so personal, though it’s just a thought with no payoff.
In the future, Nick has become a joke success with a stupid dance of his own (‘the Strut’) and he does become reconciled to that – though going back in time to invent something he’s seen an alternate self demonstrate is pretty much the same thing as plagiarism. This time, Lou gets shot in the dick by a mystery avenger and the trio use the time machine and its gizmo fuel to go to the future to track down the time-traveller with an animus against a man everyone has good reason to want to kill – even with his existence in peril, Lou’s basic urge is to get wasted and be an asshole to his friends and strangers alike. When they meet Adam Jr, who is about to get married, he is dragged on a quest to meet his father – a thread dropped because of the no-Cusack factor – and he winds up being drugged, VR raped, have his scrotum inflated by nanobots and be driven mad by the sight of his fiancee (Gillian Jacobs) fucking his uncle by marriage. Women are still props – a minor plot element is that Kelly (Collette Wolfe), Lou’s wife, has divorced him in the future and become a doctor … but he goes back to the present and wins her back, stomping her chance of self-actualisation flat without a second thought. Chevy Chase is in for a cameo that just ticks a box. Written and directed by returnees Josh Heald (additional screenwriting by John Karnay) and Steve Pink.
Chris Cooke doesn’t half sound sexist, Kim?
David Hughes There *was* a bit about Back to the Future (you can still see it in one of the early US trailers), but thankfully it was cut out – thankfully, because it’s Lou (Rob Corddry) talking about “that shitty movie Back to the Future”, which is a bit rich when you’ve (a) ripped off the plot *and* the subplot, and (b) cast Crispin Glover just to seal the deal…
Stone Franks Crispin Glover is a legend “SIT DOWN, BITCH!” (what’s that from?) Didn’t he have some kind of legal row over the BttF sequels?
Chris Cooke The SIT DOWN BITCH Crispin Glover quote has eased my worries…
Marc Kandel So no mention or attempt to lampoon any Savage Steve Holland films which basically laid the foundation for Cusack’s career (or at least kept him in enough paychecks to continue to pursue an acting as a profession)? No shout-outs to “Say Anything”? You get John Cusack (who’s already kind of revisited his derelict 80’s world albeit in the far more complex, excellent “Grosse Point Blank”), and you don’t even throw in a “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS” reference? I dunno, either its a credit to the filmmakers who don’t go for the easy “Pleasure Through Recognition” audience pleaser that elbows its way into most comedies today, or its a whiff on a good pitch.
The image in my mind of seeing Cusack’s audience-winking discomfort of suddenly being trapped in one of his silly 80’s movies of yore… where he has to ski a mountain or win a boat race… to me that’s funny- kind of like that one throw away gag in that John Ritter movie about the remote control from hell where he walks into his old “Three’s Company” set complete with two bimbos and screams.
Chris Cooke Didn’t Cusack and Holland fall out – or rather Cusak didn’t get Holland at all and was a massive problem…?
Marc Kandel that’s the apocryphal tale, though I’m too lazy to google if there’s any merit to it at the moment. But that’s also my point- throwing Cusack, who is now one of our best American actors out there when given good material, back into a private hell of 80’s fluff where he evidently hated every moment and giving us a fly-on-the-wall perspective of him trying to claw his way out buy having to run the gauntlet of all the silly plot contrivances and dumb jokes BUT as the capable leading man we know him to be with years of experience behind him…That’s gold to me. Otherwise, why cast him? Does he need the second summer home that bad.
Chris Cooke I think it’s more than apocryphal – I think he really let Holland down… Here’s the great Savage Steve Holland on the issue:
“we’re all watching the Better Off Dead screening that night, and John walked out of the movie. About 20 minutes into it, he walked out, and he never came back.
The next morning, he basically walked up to me and was like, “You know, you tricked me. Better Off Dead was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me.”
And that’s during the shoot of the follow up ONE CRAZY SUMMER… these are still two of the best films CUSACK was ever lucky enough to be in… I hope he matured and realised what a fool he had been…
http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000134.php
and
http://talkingmoviezzz.blogspot.com/…/what-ever…
Marc Kandel the sneeze article is made of win. Thank you. I just about pissed myself on Steve’s recounting of his actual suicide attempts a la Lane. And that cements it for me- this should have been (and maybe is, I’m not getting that from Kim’s review though) “John Cusack versus the 80’s.” A chance for him to cathartically exsangunate everything he hated about those films as an older, wiser John Cusack.
Marc Kandel By the way, forget Cusack, how much of a dick was the guy Holland knew, who walked out of the film and said “Better luck next time.” I mean, at least Cusack put in the hours to perhaps excuse him for not wanting to see the rest (no, that was a dick move also), but some guy who is supposedly your friend, who not only doesn’t have the courtesy to stick with the film but has to punctuate his rudeness with a flippant remark rather than just quietly absconding from the theater? That dude makes the red crayon death list in my world.
Chris Cooke too true!
and I would love a Cusak versus the 80’s film – one where he kills Tom Hanks for Party Animal would do it for me…
Marc Kandel Tom Hanks was in “Party Animal”? I have to admit, I’m of the firm belief that “Bachelor Party” is the heir apparent to “Animal House”. As funny? No… but more laughs than the average comedy these days and as balls to the wall insane and lewd with a healthy “Anything Goes” attitude.
Chris Cooke That’s it – DOH! – apologies PARTY ANIMAL fans – I meant BACHELOR PARTY!