On DVD: John Cusack Gets Menopausal in Hot Tub Time Machine

Not hard to love: When stick-dumb movies just lay out their idiotic premise right in the title -- call it the Snakes on a Plane Syndrome -- hiding nothing, leaving no recourse for shame or cross-marketing vagueness or anything else, really, that might mess with the movie's ability to rise or fall on its dubious merits as all movies should. (It could be a Google translation tool.) Steve Pink's piquant comedy Hot Tub Time Machine is all the title promises and a splash of urine and exactly nothing much more, which is why it's funny, and why lowered expectations should be a vital area of sociopsychological study for Hollywood publicists. Imagine the manure we wouldn't have to wade through.

In other words, it's not Rules of the Game, or even Pleasantville, from which it sort of lifts its unexplained barely-a-MacGuffin: a ski resort tub that transports four ne'er-do-well wastrels back to 1986 so three of them can relive the pivotal night after which their lives began going down the toilet. John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry are, respectively, a terminal bachelor insurance agent, an L.A. pet-grooming nobody, and a suicidal alcoholic Keith Moon varietal. They drag along with them Cusack's nephew (Clark Duke), who wasn't even alive in 1986. (He was born nine months later -- nudge.) The guy-guy patter is on the rank side by even Apatow standards, but when Corddry, excited to return to the fabled ski resort of the friends' youth, laboriously and enthusiastically yanks out his own catheter, spraying the room with pee, you know there won't be any foul thing left off the film's radar.

Frankly, the film might've peaked with spectacular discomfort right there in Corddry's hospital bed, but never mind, you know what the set up is and the film makes good on virtually every exploitation of that idea you can think of, down to the fluorescent anti-fashions and cocaine ubiquity and hellish Hair Band soundtrack. That includes the inescapable fact that for these troubled boys and us, going back to the '80s means mostly revisiting very bad '80s-movies cliches - chiseled bully villains, TV-high-school-level relationships, quests for self-esteem, etc. Cusack made a slew of those movies in his youth, and so here he is, plenty weary, looking at the foundation of his own career and going pale at the sight. There are those of us who wish the '80s, movie-wise, never happened, and now it seems that Cusack officially joins our company, with rue in his heart.

But it's funny, Hot Tub Time Machine -- not consistently but in spittling little chunks, and that's all that's required. Corddry, as a toxic, beady-eyed misanthrope, gets all the best and most vicious lines, but if you look very hard you can see a desperate mid-life crisis kernel of feeling in all three characters, which is more than you can say for Grown Ups or any other recent film made by middle-aged comedians, struggling to align their inevitable aging with youth-demographic schtick. Boys will be boys, until they're sad menopausal men.