Skip to main content

Hot Tub Time Machine: Good Disgusting Fun



Let's get this right out of the way, this is not a science fiction movie, time travel is just treated as a magical effect that lets our heroes travel back in time, where they do all kinds of stuff that should create any number of paradoxes.


The premise is: Three friends and a nephew take a trip to relive the friends' glory days, staying in the same hotel room that they stayed in 24 years prior. After a night of drinking heavily in the hot tub, they dip a Russian energy drink (it's got illegal ingredients!) into the timing control of the tub, and wake up in 1986. They appear as the same to themselves and each other, but reflections in the mirror, and other people perceive them as their 1986 counterparts. Except for the nephew, who wasn't born yet in 1986.


What follows is an interesting look at three people, whose lives haven't been going where they thought they would, view living through their teenage glory day again. The humor is good, if more than a little vulgar.


I had a fun time with the movie, but the ending did make me think that maybe everything wasn't as hunkydory as it could have been.


SPOILER!


The movie ends with each of the three friends making the starts of very positive changes in their lives, and repairing the hot tub, so they can return to their own time, at the last minute, one of them decides to stay in the past, and live his life over again. The remaining 2 friends and nephew return to the present, where the friend who stayed behind has left the bell boy with instructions on where they now live. It's revealed that he's exploited his knowledge of the future to make himself filthy stinking rich, most notably, Google is now Lougle.


Cusack's character finds himself living with the intelligent funny girl that he met on his second time around at the hotel, and the last man has become an award winning music producer.


At first glance, everything seems fabulous for these people. But the three people that rode the time machine forward no longer know anything about their lives. They are 24 years in the dark, they may have great lives, but they don't have any of the memories associated with getting there. Instead, they've got the 24 years of living their mediocre lives from a timeline that no longer exists. Sure, this will definitely help them better appreciate what they have, but they miss out on all of the wonderful experiences that lead up to it.


Not to mention all of the birthdays, anniversaries, job skills, and just other factual knowledge that they're going to be lacking.


You could argue, since it's more magical than technical, that maybe they'll eventually discover all of the memories and knowledge that they've acquired in this new timeline, which I'm inclined to do, since I love a happy ending. But it certainly leaves it open to question.



Bottom line, this is kind of a cynical redux of an '80s teen comedy, not a science fiction comedy a la Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. But it's still a lot of fun.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...
Post a Comment
Read more

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...
2 comments
Read more

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...
2 comments
Read more