Hot Tub Time Machine – **
Directed by Steve Pink
Starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke
Rated R
Release date: March 26, 2010

What a luxury it must be to go back in time and alter your entire future. You will especially be prompted to do so if in the present day you are condemned to a life that either has your wife bailing on you, suicide plaguing your every waking hours, or pulling excrement out of a dog’s behind. Yeah, one can easily be negatively affected, haunted, and scarred by these particular instances. As matter of fact, anything that can slightly act as an anecdote against such impervious circumstances should be valued immediately by the victims. That anecdote happens to be a hot tub which acts out of character by morphing into a time machine. Once the film, not surprisingly titled Hot Tub Time Machine, makes it all too clear, in a paint-by-numbers way, who these individuals are (played by John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson) that are primarily subjected to the ghastly implications of their reality, it is hard for us to emphasize the slightest sense of sympathy because they are all rotten to the core with an obscene sense of reconciliation and individualism.

Directed by Steve Pink, who’s other outlandish comedy, Accepted, involved a creation of a collegiate university, the film has a tinge of romanticism to it, manly romanticism, and even a vision that can produce a narrative that is cautionary and sad: Themes that employ the sense of loss, a time, and place when man was happy only to return there years later to find it destroyed. Even though these possible themes are expunged from the film within the first fifteen minutes, there is still an inkling of what these themes could have produced if director Pink deflected the over-use of primitive humor for cheap laughs. Homage to the 80s is much welcomed and some members from the audience will have a blast from the past, with jokes that are witty and relevant to that particular era.