Hot Tub Time Machine * (2010, John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Sebastian Stan, Lyndsy Fonseca, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase) – Classic Movie Review 4629

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. The usually highly engaging John Cusack blots his copybook with director Steve Pink’s horrible, smutty, foul-mouthed, feel-bad 2010 time-travelling farce. Cusack plays Adam in which he and a ghastly pair of middle-aged losers are transported back to the 1980s in a mysterious hot tub.

It starts just about OK when the group of old friends are disappointed with the way their lives have turned out and decide take a nostalgia trip to a winter ski resort where they partied as teenagers. The hot tub there turns out to be a malfunctioning time machine that takes Adam his two friends Nick (Craig Robinson) and Lou (Rob Corddry) and nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) back to 1986 so the three can relive their fateful night but not change anything to ensure the nephew is born.

But it is all with the way downhill after that with rotten, rancid jokes and useless ‘special’ effects.

Fans of Old School and The Hangover might like to try it if they have not got anything better to do after the pub, but classy actor Cusack proves definitively that he cannot do farce and that slumming is not his best route to go. Under-performing like this, he doesn’t look cool, just unengaged.

It is hard to believe the director wrote the scripts for Cusack’s clever and amusing Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. Josh Heald provides the story and co-writes the screenplay with Sean Anders and John Morris.

Also in the cast are Sebastian Stan, Lyndsy Fonseca, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase (as the repairman), Charlie McDermott, Lizzy Caplan and Collette Wolfe.

It was a hit and spawned a sequel, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4629

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