Hot Tub Time Machine follows four deadbeats who are down on life, love and have generally lost momentum: Adam (John Cusack) is an uptight insurance broker who has been heartlessly dumped by his girlfriend; Jacob (Clark Duke) is a geeky teen, unable to leave his basement and glued to his laptop; Nick (Craig Robinson) is a down on his luck ex-rocker who now cleans up dog crap for a living; and Lou (Rob Corddry) is a steaming drunk whose family hates him.
After a supposed suicide attempt from Lou and in an effort to escape from the ever-increasing rut the four of them are slipping into, the four guys decide to take a weekend break to their old ski-resort haunt, Kodiak Valley. The hotel is nothing like it was in their eighties heyday and is significantly run down – even the bell boy is missing an arm! Luckily, the guys are fortunate enough to have a shiny looking hot tub on their veranda, which they waste no time in jumping into.
A mountain of booze, a squirrel and one can of illegal energy drink ‘Chernobley’ later, and the troubled foursome are not only suffering from pruney fingers and a killer hangover – they’re also surrounded by eighties paraphernalia. With brightly coloured lycra, cassette players, giant mobile phones (just like Dom Joly) and the fact that Michael Jackson is still white, they soon discover that they’ve been inexplicably fired back to the eighties; Winterfest ’86 to be precise.
With the time-bending hot tub fried, Adam, Nick and Lou embrace their eighties counterparts. As it goes with all time travelling movies, Jacob is quick to inform them that they have to repeat exactly what happened the first time round, or they may change the future. For Adam this means being stabbed in the eye with a fork, whilst Lou gets beaten up and Nick performs awfully with his band and gets booed off stage. Without even intending to, they do things insanely different but still end up getting injured in some way or another. A mysterious repairman, in the form of Chevy Chase, appears to tell them they shouldn’t be changing things and that they must find a can of Chernobley to get home as that was what spilled on the hot tub electrics, turning it into a Hot Tub Time Machine!
Together they hunt down and recover the Chernobley, which had been stolen by the guys who beat Lou up, and rush to get home. Lou, confessing he really was trying to kill himself in the present, stays in the past, hoping he can change his life for the better. He wasn’t wrong. Adam, Nick and Jacob return to the present to find Lou has exploited his knowledge of the future and is a billionaire, making his money from search engine, ‘Lougle’ and rock band ‘The Motley Lou’. Take that Butterfly Effect!
Hot Tub Time Machine is a guilty-pleasure comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The storyline is nothing but ridiculous and it seems the writers knew this and just did the film for a bit of a giggle. Hearty laugh out loud moments, a corking eighties soundtrack and some of my favourite comedy faces gives this one: 6.5/10.
It doesn’t have Marty McFly and a flux capacitor, but it’s still pretty good going.
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