Review: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 Is #2 In More Ways Than One

Hot Tub Time Machine 2's first mistake is expecting us to recall the plot and events of the first film. The sequel indeed begins where the first one left off, which, if memory serves, was a quick series of throwaway flashcard and headline gags showing how the main characters end up using the time machine to become rich and famous in cornball ways. You know, stuff like the character named Lou founding Google, except it's "Lougle." Or, tone deaf Craig Robinson commandeering the hit songs of the last 25 years to make himself a pop music superstar, supplanting Nirvana, Lisa Loeb, and others. 

It was all good for a chuckle at the end of the original lowbrow time travel comedy. But to ask us to spend the first 15 minutes on plot stuff in the offices of Lougle and to remember and care about these hateful and repulsive people is asking too much. Instead of the actual jokes, the movie hurls a barrage of vulgarity and crude dialogue. It literally never stops. And don't forget prolonged tacky Trivia Crush-looking drug trip sequences; those take an excruciatingly long amount of screen time. Instead of attempting to be engaging with the story or a situation we might care about -- or that even makes sense -- it ops to blow a guy's crotch off with a shotgun, and go from there. It's a surprisingly dark turn, I'll give it that. But if a massive, bloody, out-of-nowhere destruction of a guy's genitals is your idea of a hilarious time at the movies, then I guess we disagree on Hot Tub Time Machine 2. 

The nebulous premise is that the guys, on different levels, begin to experience regret for having foisted themselves onto the world by altering history. For convoluted and dumb reasons, their new time traveling hot tub takes them to the future, where they must somehow stop the one guy's junk from getting shot off in the altered past. It's there, in the year 2025, that they meet Adam Scott, playing John Cusack's son. Adam Scott has a history of being tolerable at best in movies, and his involvement in this one knocks him down several more pegs in my book. Somehow, these guys wind up competing on a virtual reality game show hosted by Christian Slater. And wouldn't you know it, the central gag of the entire prolonged set piece ends up being man-on-man sex. Always hilarious! In this future, this game is the most popular show worldwide. 

That we're supposed to find these guys lovable scads when they're irritating jerks is the film's biggest failure. As tolerable (if not memorable) as they were in the first go 'round, this time their only redeeming quality is that we stop seeing them after 93 minutes. The leads, all actually funny elsewhere, seem to be approaching the material thusly: Craig Robinson strains to bring humanity, but is repeatedly crushed in doing so. Clark Duke seems to recognize that this movie needs more, and struggles to smarten it up wherever possible. No dice. Rob Corddry exhibits the defeated wisdom of acting the material as straightforwardly as possible. It's a starring role, be grateful for that, and just get through it. 

On the supporting level, Chevy Chase, so celebrated for his oddball turn in the original, turns up again as the mystical tub repairman - a completely expendable one minute of screen time. And in a film that clearly doesn't know what to do with women, Bainca Hasse as Clark Duke's love interest suffers the most contrivance and indignity. One moment she's the cute coat check girl with her head on straight, then POOF! It's off to an alternate reality where she strolls out topless to greet the fellas in Duke's future mansion. Sexy, no. Uncomfortably grating objectification, yes. Then the movie forgets about her. And immediately, it's impossible to root for these two characters to get together, as this hedonistic mansion existence is the movie's idea of an idealized outcome. In fact, there's no one worth rooting for in the entire film. It's a broken jacuzzi of unclean film. 

Although Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a bigger-budgeted follow-up film that was advertised during the Super Bowl and has the freight train backing of not one but two major studios behind it, it has the unintentional look and feel of a made-for-TV movie from decades ago. The 2025 future year aesthetics are even several steps behind the gaudy wrongness of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey's futuristic set dressing. Were it not for the occasional holographic technology or a lame subplot where robotic smart cars have become homicidal, it'd be easy to forget it's even the future. Why this isn't premiering directly onto video store shelves - next to John Cusack's latest offering, perhaps - is a more engaging question than anything put forth by the movie itself. 

We've seen lazy, stupid and repugnant before, but this marries it with the smug self satisfaction of the Hangover sequels, and even goes for an 11th hour-and-59th minute sentimental tug of the heartstrings. Oh no you don't, Hot Tub Time Machine 2. This is a poorly made, non-engaging, ugly and soul-sucking experience. It's the kind of movie one emerges from crushed, moved to question one's entire life and what unfortunate choices might've led to the moment of being in this theater watching this movie. 

Not so much a movie as a nauseating experience, it's indicative of everything that's wrong with Hollywood's sequel-greenlighting mentality. If only there were a way to go back and stop this movie from ever happening. The biggest and only irony of it is that Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is foisting itself unasked-for onto the world just as its main characters have done at the end of the previous film, and now feel badly about.

Unfortunately, the only way anyone involved with this shortsighted mess would likely feel such regret would be if the movie loses money. God willing, it'll go quietly right down the drain. Because once you've seen it, there's not hot tub that can make you feel clean enough and no time machine to turn back the clock. Follow the lead of Cusack and stay out of this grimy tub, which would have been better left abandoned in the past