Three friends, Adam (Cusack), Nick (Robinson), and Lou (Corddry), to escape from their bored adult lives take a trip to their favourite ski resort. But when they jumped into the hotel’s hot tub they are transported back to the summer of 1986 along with Adam’s nephew Jacob (Duke). Now, the three best friends are given a chance to either walk the same path or to re-do things to make their lives perfect.
Adam must find a way to get a perfect girlfriend and Nick should find a way to have control over his nagging wife while Lou, a party guy must get his mojo back for Jacob’s existence. In the process we have ‘hard decisions’ taken, including whether to dump or not dump an old girlfriend, or stand up to a bully. How will the guys steer their fate now seem a bigger challenge than their year 2010 lives.
If “The Hangover” was hot, “Hot Tub Time Machine” is even hotter and also cleverly executed with raunchy dialogues, yet minus the vulgarity. The film at first seems to be a yet another teen-movie, but the movie-goers are treated with a sense of seriousness with its ‘Poison’-era music and the period setup. The summer of ’86 seems to be a carefree period, but this film takes a look at it from the present time. It finally dawns that it was also an era of multitude errors.
Director Steve Pink also brings in a new lease of life to John Cusack’s career. Who could have thought John Cussak will ever be funny? See it for yourself.
However, the guys’ problems are sometimes projected as either too simple to be bothered about or the solutions are stupidly solved. Besides, the slow pace in the second half, the essence of time is also a bit phony even as the director fails to dig deeper into the time machine itself.
Yet, the final product we get is still refreshing and consumable for young adults.