As the title and concept of 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine suggested, the time travel comedy was one of the cleverest and most original comedies in years. It also became a surprise minor hit, grossing $64 million worldwide and earning over $30 million more on DVD and Blu-ray sales in the U.S. Director Steve Pink and screenwriter Josh Heald (who co-wrote the original with Sean Anders and John Morris) were probably as surprised as everyone else when a sequel got greenlit, albeit with a lower budget than the original. So how does Hot Tub Time Machine 2 hold up to the cult classic original?
Five years after using a time machine to fix their screwed-up lives, Lou (Rob Corddry), Nick (Craig Robinson), and Jacob (Clark Duke) have become rich trading in on their knowledge of the future (John Cusack, who co-starred as Adam in the original, is written out in an extremely flimsy way though the movie makes multiple attempts to fool the audience into thinking he’ll pop in for a cameo). Despite their immense financial success, the trio is unhappy and feel like that something has been missing from their lives ever since they returned from the 1980s. When a mysterious assassin shoots Lou, the three friends jump into the time machine to go back in time to save his life. However, the group is launched ten years into the future instead and are told by the Repairman (Chevy Chase, who spends even less time onscreen here than he did in the original) that the answer to the mystery lies in the future, not the past. Soon the group meets up with Adam Jr. (Adam Scott), who joins them in their search to save Lou’s life… in the past.
While Adam Scott is more of a comedian than Cusack is, Adam Jr. isn’t an adequate replacement for his father in the film. Adam Jr. starts out as a boring, straight-laced goody-goody, so you know exactly where this character is going to go with this crew. With no disrespect to Scott, the character of Adam Jr. just doesn’t work well with these guys, even as a dorky foil. After a particularly overlong game show sequence which attempts to repeat the awkwardness of the bathroom football bet from the first film, he’s really just a warm body to give the other three characters someone else to riff on.
Going only ten years in the future is a funny concept because little has actually changed, though it was apparently enough time for Cusack’s character to have a thirty-something son that none of the other characters previously knew about (the film’s most glaring plot hole). However, it lacks the humorous nostalgia from the original that riffed on 1980s culture and movies. The characters make dozens of references to other movies, which is sort of a wink to the fact that the basic plot is a patchwork made up of plot points from better films. While Hot Tub Time Machine had plenty of gross-out jokes, the sequel takes it to an entirely different level of sleaze. Unfortunately, instead of getting more clever — like the jokes about Soviet spies or the speculation on when the bellhop will lose his arm in the original — the jokes are just grosser. Personally, I’d take clever over gross every time because gross humor, while funny, is easy. The smart riffs of the original Hot Tub Time Machine are sorely missed. In fact, the funniest part of the film is the credits in which the characters talk about their humorous exploits throughout time. Of course, due to budget restraints these exploits are only talked about and depicted in badly photoshoped photos, but at least they’re clever.
The ten year jump also helped the film save on budget by avoiding expensive props, as did moving the setting to New Orleans, where it is cheap to film. There’s definitely a mothball quality to the humor — it was shot in 2013 and was originally slated for a release last year. There’s even a part about midway through the film when it’s obvious that Robinson had to dub in “2015” in his dialogue, though releasing the film in 2015 ends up being an unintentional nod to Back to the Future Part II.
Few anticipated comedy sequels ever live up the original — Anchorman 2, The Hangover Part II, and Dumb and Dumber To are all great examples of sequels that have their merits but can’t touch the humor of the first movies — and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 joins their ranks. It probably wasn’t possible for Pink, Heald, and three-fourths of the cast to recapture the cult classic magic of the original film. Still, the result is a perfectly acceptable comedy, even if it fails to hold up to the original in every way.
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