Three friends, Adam, Nick, and Lou have seen better days. Now in their middle ages, they find their lives slipping away from the dreams and ambitions they once had. After Lou has a mishap (or potential suicide attempt) with car exhaust and a sealed garage, the three hit the road with Adam’s nephew Jacob to a winter ski resort that they kicked at in the old days. The first night there as the four are relaxing in the bubbling, heated water containment unit, a mishap with a Russian drink and the hot tub controls results in a transportation back to 1986, a crucial year for the friends at the same resort. They realize with the help of an old, sage hot tub repairman that they must not deviate from their previous actions for fear of a dramatic ripple effect to the rest of the world. As this is a testosterone-filled comedy, that doesn’t happen as the down-trodden men stuck in teenage bodies attempt to right their prior wrongs.
While there are certainly comparisons to be made to the Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips like-minded comedies, Hot Tub doesn’t feel like an Apatow movie or even The Hangover. For starters, the characters are pretty flat. Aside from what we learn in the first ten minutes about their lives, there is not a great deal of development about their current lives. This is not necessarily a bad thing as the characters are rather stock. Nick is the dreamer, Lou is the asshole, Jacob is the nerd, and Adam is the straight-man to counter the absurdity of the situation. The bulk of the film has the group reliving out their childhood but it might have helped to understand more about the consequences those first actions had on their next few decades and how the deviations would have helped or even hurt.
On the plus side, all of the characters are funny as hell and very aware of the implications for their situation. Several references to the time traveling adventures (and subsequent paradoxes) of The Terminator and the Stargate series help ground the film as the realistic interpretation of what would happen if these guys were actually transported back in time. Even knowing what they do about the butterfly effect (the theory and the movie), they still fuck up the space/time continuum for the sake of their own personal gain. Whereas Back to the Future preached for responsible time travel, Hot Tub throws all of that out the window as Nick and Lou try to hustle a crowd on the outcome of a football game and Adam avoids breaking up with a hot girl because it was a really stupid thing to do and it resulted in him getting stabbed in the eye.
Setting the movie in the 80s is a relative goldmine for the trends and fads from that period which are so laughable now, it is conceivable that someone might set up a retro reunion as one of the characters ponders early on. From the leg warmers, MTV showing music videos, and even good old cassette players, you did not necessarily have to be alive during the 80s to see the humor as this group of iPhone carrying, Google-using, modern men try to wrap their head around a group of people wearing bright neon ski-suits or using the old-fashioned Zack Morris phone. Of course, the soundtrack helps to drive the point home as well with a good heaping of cheese and excess is blaring during a good portion of the film. Having only visited the 80s in my much younger years, I’m sure there were more subtleties that escaped me but it is quite fun to revisit these modern day anachronisms.
If I had any complaints about the movie (other than the previous character issues noted above), it would be that the setting of the bulk hinders what the group can fuck up for the future. Obviously, the ski weekend serves the story well as an important few days for each of the guys but it would have been fun to see that expanded out of the small town, if only for a few more 80s jokes at the expense of Michael Jackson or the Cold War. With the film clocking in at a reasonable 100 minutes length, for some reason this seemed to drag on much longer as I was about ready for it to end about fifteen to twenty minutes before it actually did. While the laughs are bold and frequent, there were some portions that fall flat. This is normal for most comedies but the as the funny parts were quite good, the unfunny seemed to detract even more.
So, admittedly the movie is not as good as The Hangover but for a semi-raunchy male-driven comedy by someone other than Apatow, that is a lofty goal to reach. It does have more class than comedies of its bygone era, better star power and even Crispin Glover in what is likely a career-making role (if we consider he has not had one yet) and I suspect Hot Tub will play even better on repeat viewings with drunken cohorts. I am beginning to think the concept of unrated DVDs were created for movies like this.
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