I really wanted to like this more than I did. The title alone pretty much brings automatic goodwill, and the premise, which sort of combines last year's surprise hit, The Hangover, with Back to the Future, sounds like it should be a lot of fun. It should be, and it is at times. But not enough for me to recommend Hot Tub Time Machine. For the scattered jokes that do work, there are far too many that don't. This is a Level 1 comedy. They had the title, the premise, and the cast. That's a great start. Too bad they didn't go much further, and truly exploit the potential.

At the outset, we meet three long time friends who are all suffering mid-life doldrums. Adam (John Cusack) just went through a nasty divorce, his ex-wife took almost everything, and now he's stuck alone with his nerdy nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), who spends all day in the basement on the computer. Nick (Craig Robinson) is a washed up singer whose career never took off, and now works at a pet center. (This allows the movie to have it's first gross-out gag about two minutes in, where he has to stick his hand up a dog's rear end to fish out some car keys.) Lou (Rob Corddry) is a former wild man who realizes the party is over, and is now a suicidal alcoholic. The guys feel they need an opportunity to get away from their troubles, so they take Jacob, and head for their favorite teenage vacation spot - a Colorado ski resort where the three friends have some of their happiest youthful memories of sex, booze, and drugs. They arrive at the resort, only to find it mostly abandoned, run down, and its main employee is a one-armed bellhop with an attitude (Crispin Glover), who kicks the guests' luggage around with his feet and is disrespectful, but still expects a big tip at the end.

But hey, at least the hot tub outside their room works! Sure, it's emitting a mysterious, eerie orange glow, but that doesn't stop the guys from diving in with a mixture of alcohol and a Russian energy drink made up of illegal ingredients. The liquid concoction somehow ends up shorting out the electronic sensor on the hot tub, and this activates a swirling vortex which sends the four guys back in time to 1986 - the time when the ski resort was at the peak of its popularity, and Adam, Nick, and Lou were hip teens looking for action. In fact, when the three guys see themselves in the mirror, they look like their younger selves. Young Jacob looks the same, but his body flickers in and out of existence from time to time, so the guys realize they have to make sure not to screw the past up and ensure the right future. As Adam, Nick, and Lou relive their past, Jacob tries to track down a mysterious repair man (Chevy Chase), who seems to know how to fix the hot tub and send them back to their own time, but has a bad habit of speaking in riddles and disappearing and reappearing at will.

I can certainly accept the out-there premise, and even think it could work, but the movie plays it too safe to truly take advantage of its own weirdness. Instead of exploiting the idea of these guys being transported back in time to their past, the movie wastes a lot of time on obvious and overdone jokes about the era. The bad hair, the cheesy music, the guy talking on a really big cell phone, the leg warmers...These jokes have become cliche by now, and Hot Tub Time Machine is content to merely roll them out, not going to the next level, and actually doing something unexpected. That's really what holds the whole film back. It never goes far enough, and gives us only the norm. We know what will happen to these characters, we know what the "third act twist" will be concerning the identity of Jacob's father (whom he never met), and we can see how a lot of the gags will play out a mile away, because director Steve Pink (Accepted) never quite shows the right timing for a lot of the jokes.

Granted, some big laughs do manage to show through. But a movie like this needs to be risky and wild. This one seems strangely uncertain. It also has a couple bad ideas that just don't work out, namely the Chevy Chase character. He never makes any real impression, and just is not funny at all here. He's not the only disappointment in the cast, unfortunately. John Cusack is surprisingly boring in a straight role. You'd think with his past as an 80s teen actor, he'd be able to rift a little bit on it, or maybe poke fun at himself. Clark Duke is also disappointing, and often comes across as a wannabe Jonah Hill. The members of the cast who seem to be having the most fun are Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Crispin Glover. They also have the best understanding of the material, and get all the laughs. They know how to make it work, and although the movie gives Corddry and Robinson lots to do, they can't carry the entire film on their own, despite their best efforts.
Hot Tub Time Machine has obviously been designed to ride the wave of popularity of The Hangover, but it fails to understand what made that film special. It took a simple premise, then simply ran with it to the most ridiculous extremes it could think of. The strong lead performances added a lot, too. I think this film had all the essential things for a similar success, but it never comes together like it should.

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