To paraphrase Jason London's character in Dazed and Confused, "All I'm saying is, if I ever start referring to these as the best movies of my life -- remind me to kill myself." With Hot Tub Time Machine, director Steve Pink manages to connect self-conscious cinematic nostalgia to the middle-aged anomie London warns against with rowdy affection, avoiding the trap of earnest emulation that Cop Out, its recent comrade in homage, fell into. A fully committed spoof of the high concept, factory-farmed comedies of the 80s, Hot Tub goes under some pretty deep cover, glossing over big plot and pacing bumps with its proudly cruddy, in-joke attitude. Produced by a high priest of 80s effluvia (and a couple of genuine classics), John Cusack confirms his imprimatur by starring in the film. One of its genuine pleasures is watching him once again balance seriously generic, frankly sophomoric material with his sober wit and goofy, shaggy grace.
Adam (Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson), and Lou (Rob Corddry) believe adolescence really was the best years of their lives, at least compared to those that followed. We find them respectively sloughing off the decampment of yet another girlfriend, fishing lost objects out of the rear-end of a Golden Retriever, and making what seems to be an alcoholic suicide attempt to the musical accompaniment of Motley Crüe. Middle-aged men who have drifted apart due to both the rigors of domestication and the realization that they may not actually like each other anymore, the highly toxic Lou "The Violator"'s hospitalization results in a plan to try and relive happier days at Kodiak Valley, a ski resort of the trio's youth. Accompanying them is a doughy ambassador of the youth of today, Adam's nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), a game- and gadget-obsessed virgin whose hatred for hard-living Lou is only matched by what he gets in return.
At the now completely dissipated K-Val, some enforced bonding between the boys lands them in that nasty hot tub; the result is a bacchanal sequence that includes the sudden appearance of a Michael Jackson mask, a gyrating bear, and a glimpse of Lloyd Dobler's bum. It's completely ridiculous and one of the best things I've seen all year. Alas, it's a comic nirvana that can't be sustained throughout what follows, although Pinker (and screenwriters Josh Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris) get more mileage, both puerile and surprisingly poignant, out of the material than one would expect.
Part of the charm of the quartet's predicament -- they wake up from their revelry in 1986, facing down decisions that may or may not have shaped their lives -- is the film's acknowledgment of its own dopiness ("Do I have to be the asshole who says we got into this hot tub and it took us back in time?" Clark whines) and conspiratorial wink at the audience's willingness to play along. One of the heaviest of those winks has the men only appearing to be 19 to other people, and when they look in the mirror: "You look like Kid 'n Play!" Adam tells Nick, whose youthful avatar sports an enormous hi-top fade. "That's actually two people," he replies, in one of the film's gazillion throwaways and showcases of Robinson's desperately funny, almost wistful delivery.
Although it will ultimately scribble over its slender but salient character arcs with a glib, wish-fulfillment finale, Hot Tub does a nice job of setting up the usual time travel questions of moral responsibility and the illusions of memory. Adam must re-live a break-up he imbues with greater import than it actually had; Nick is scheduled for a random hook-up, and is wracked with grief over the perceived infidelity; Lou is going to get re-throttled by a Young Republican posse because his so-called friends abandon him; and Jacob, in one of the film's requisite bows to Back to the Future (the other is the presence of Crispin Glover as a one-armed bellhop, the source of a wickedly morbid running gag), comes face to face with his teenaged whore of a mother.
Pink cannot resist the music cue school of filmmaking (seriously, the gang's all here) or gag-reflexive "no homo" humor, and Hot Tub has more sketchy references than Heidi Fleiss's resume (was that the '80s?), but odds are you'll die laughing all the same. Corddry and Robinson in particular go for broke, in an apt reminder of the kind of break-out comic performances that regularly graduated '80s bit players into the big leagues.