HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 (Steve Pink). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (February 20). See listing. Rating: NN
Where to watch: Netflix, iTunes
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is exactly what you’d expect from the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine – and sadly, that’ll be reason enough for some people to rush to the megaplex this weekend. It’s an hour and a half of bros partying heartily and insulting each other while checking out the hot racks on hot ladies, with a few time-travel jokes thrown in.
This time around, having Marty McFlyed themselves a better history by tweaking the past, our idiot heroes – minus John Cusack, whose absence sets up a plot point that never actually pays off – jump 10 years into the future to figure out who’s responsible for taking a shotgun to the penis of id-monster Lou (Rob Corddry) in the present.
As before, talented comic actors – Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke and series newcomers Adam Scott, Gillian Jacobs, Jason Jones and Kumail Nanjiani – do their best to liven up a barely-there script, which director Steve Pink shoots as haphazardly as possible.
The original’s retro-fashion jokes are replaced with future-fashion jokes, and a running gag about the characters’ pilfering technological and cultural artifacts from the past and claiming them as their own runs out of gas really quickly. Worse, the thing just drips with gay panic the movie does everything but shout “no homo” at the audience as one of the characters is literally forced to rape two of the others. It’s virtual, though, because it’s the future and all. Comedy!
In the name of fairness, I’ll admit I laughed at a gag about a smart car with a vendetta against Lou, and at a couple of clever exchanges about other time-travel movies like Terminator and Looper.
And Nanjiani and Duke have a great little exchange about the mystery of “baby Superman,” but that’s really more about the actors’ timing than what they’re saying.
That goes for the whole movie.
