Hot Tub Time Machine Delivers Us, Coke-Flecked And Pruned, Back To 1986

Sure, the other Movieline guys might be busy at Comic-Con with realish-looking, 10-foot CGI aliens, lycanthrope six-packs, and, um, Jonah Hill doing some spray-paint-assisted Street Fighter promotion. But I can argue that I'm having much more fun here at home, safely 125 miles away from the teeming, shower-impaired masses in San Diego (I know, I know, harping on the smell at Comic-Con is cliche, but: this), because I was sitting by my computer when the red-band trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, the much-anticipated John Cusack vehicle that does not involve a battleship being tossed at his Apocalypse-fleeing family, was posted this morning. And that trailer will now serve as the subject of our latest installment of the Two-Minute Verdict.

Before we begin, a disclosure: Am I utterly in the tank for a movie about a time-bending Jacuzzi that stars Cusack, Rob Corrdry, and Craig Robinson, and which has the self-awareness to be called Hot Tub Time Machine, rather than something like Whirlpool: 1986 or a hackneyed reference to a some lyric from a one-hit-wonder from the 1980s? Yes, yes I am. I am constitutionally predisposed to be excited for this trailer, even if it had consisted of nothing besides the film's logo followed by a succession of title cards reading: "John Cusack." "Gets Into A Hot Tub That Goes Back In Time" "With Some Other Dudes You Like" "February 2010." Indeed, I can be very easy to please.

But, thrillingly, we get much more than that. So much more.

We get an ominous opening montage name-checking historical geniuses whose pioneering work in (admittedly inferior) pre-time-traveling-hot-tub intellectual disciplines will prepare us for what is to come: Nostradamus, Galileo, Einstein.

We get a stunned voiceover expressing the sentiment that our still-comprehending brains wish to deliver to our mouths, but can't, because our vocal chords are paralyzed with awe: "HO-LEE shit."

We get our first glance at the bubbling cauldron that will melt our protagonists into its agitated, well-chlorinated waters, wash them away them through the space-time continuum like so much unwanted bodily fluid through a spa filter, and then reconstitute them in the past wholly intact, if somewhat pruney.

We get Cusack poo-pooing Craig Robinson's theory that the hot tub that has transported them back in time might, in fact, be "some kind of...hot tub time machine!"

We get a lively, if brief, debate about the possibility of time travel.

And then we get Robinson's face caked in enough cocaine to make the septum of a Hollywood producer sympathetically disintegrate, eliciting the kind of motormouth rant fully comprehensible only to those who have also recently dipped their heads into punch bowls brimming with blow.

Oh, yes, I am in the tank. Or in the hot tub, as it were, because "tank" is so close to "hot tub" that to ignore it at this point would just be silly.

VERDICT: Dear MGM: Please move up the release date to, hmmm, let's say next week? OK, terrific. See you then!

Hot Tub Time Machine Red Band Trailer [TrailerSpy]