“Am I going to be the asshole that suggests we got into this thing and went back in time?”
- Clark Duke
I subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a movie. It all depends on how you deliver it. I will concede however that some ideas are generally easier to screw up than others. A movie based on a Hot Tub Time Machine is one of those. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject matter. It’s just that when the creators of a movie named “Hot Tub Time Machine” hit a rough patch in the production process whether it be in writing, acting, or editing, there is always the temptation to be all like, “Well, only people with absolutely no standards would go see a movie with a title like this anyway, so why on earth are we trying to make it good? Let’s just half-ass it and hopefully these morons will think it’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie.” I’m glad to say that somehow that didn’t happen here. This movie could have easily gone down the tempting road to comedy hell known as “so-bad-it’s-good” but instead followed through on the noble ambition of actually being funny. It all has to do with delivery.
The movie starts off by introducing four losers played by John Cusack, Craig Robinson (The Office), Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), and Clark Duke (ubiquitous dude in the background of the party in Superbad). John Cusack just got recently divorced. Craig Robinson works in a degrading animal related job. Clark Duke, John’s nephew, spends his days in the basement, playing a much more athletic version of himself in a second-life computer game. That might be somewhat redeeming if his character wasn’t currently in prison. Clark spends all of his time telling himself* to do more simulated pushups. Rob Corddry is the worst of all of them. He’s a raging alcoholic, friendless, clueless, and apparently very stupid when drunk. He accidentally almost kills himself by gunning his car to Motley Crue in his closed-off garage. Confronted with the sobering idea that their old friend just tried to kill himself (which he vehemently denies), the gang gets back together in an effort to get their mojo back: They go to the ski resort they frequented when young to have a nostalgic weekend of drunken debauchery. Here they find the aforementioned hot tub, jump in, get blackout drunk, hallucinate about Reagan and Aids, and are transported back to a pivotal weekend in their lives in 1986.
The movie assumes you know all about the paradoxes of time travel, so there isn’t much time wasted with the ground already covered by ‘Back to the Future.’ The huge conflict is Clark Duke’s neurotic fear that if the old guys change anything they did that weekend, then a bunch of butterflies are going to attack and he will cease to exist. Problem is that this weekend wasn’t very good for the guys. Cusack got stabbed in the eye with a fork while dumping his then girlfriend. Craig had a very mediocre performance with his band that ended his musical career. Rob got his ass kicked twice by an asshole ski-instructor. After one night, there is no telling whether any of them will actually go through with the humiliation. Rob Corddry in particular is not prone to giving a shit about any undue influence on the time-space continuum.
The movie is directed by a young director named Steve Pink and written by a trio of writers. The story idea belongs to Josh Heald. It is his first. The two others, Sean Anders and John Morris, have been involved in other Cusack pictures like Gross Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. The movie’s humor is very broad, raucous, and scatological. But it treats it well. I have always felt that the best way to treat a throw-up joke is to tell it without buildup so it is a surprise and then go straight into something else. You don’t want to linger there. There’s a particularly good one involving a cute squirrel and Rob Corddry’s hangover reaction to it. The “punch-line” lasts about half-a-second. That’s a good time period. It doesn’t take the audience any longer than that to get the joke. These guys know what they’re doing. The entire movie is very fast paced. When there is a scene that doesn’t work entirely or isn’t incredibly funny, Pink moves onto something else fairly quickly. Hot Tub Time Machine never rises to the heights of something like “The Hangover,” but it does the best with what it has and when it notices that it might be losing the audience, it pumps out the volume, ramps up the pace, and gives the actors free rein to act as broadly and loudly as possible.
The one revelation this movie has is Rob Corddry’s performance. I would liken it to Ed Helms’ performance in “The Hangover” last year. The guy has been funny forever on The Daily Show and in bit parts in other movies, but this is the first time that he has been given a substantial role that is custom tailored to his testorone-fueled sociopathic persona. He gives it his all and knocks it out of the park. This is the best work he has ever done. I’ve watched the guy for so long now that I felt kind of proud watching this movie. The ending of this movie is over-the-top, balls-to-the-walls, unjust, and uncalled for. But it works because it fits his performance perfectly.
What I don’t really understand is what the hell John Cusack is doing in this movie. Lately he seems to be telling his agent to look for the craziest ridiculous movies he can possibly be in, like say 2012. Cusack has always been somewhat funny but has never been a comedian. His persona is too earnest and dare I say, normal. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. He was inexplicably also in such movies as Being John Malkovich, Con Air, and Bullets Over Broadway. I didn’t particularly think he fit into any of those movies either. I’m not saying he did a bad job in this one. It was just a little distracting. What the hell is John Cusack, who at one time used to be A-list, doing in a Hot Tub Time Machine?
There are plenty of jokes and references to the 80s. Besides the parts where the characters point out Jerri Curls, leg warmers, and a black Michael Jackson, most are subtle like the iconic Sixteen Candles romantic framing, A Christmas Story inspired fight, and a direct homage to Back to the Future when Craig Robinson decides to bust out the Black Eyed Peas during his concert. Then there are supporting roles by such 80s stars like Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase as the comfortably unhelpful hot tub mechanic. The movie however doesn’t depend entirely on these references to make us laugh. It realizes that comedy requires more than just pointing them out and builds actual jokes off of the references. That’s the difference between a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie and an actually good one. The former requires an input of ironic awareness from the audience to make the jokes work. An actually good movie stands alone like say, this one.
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