Hot Tub Time Machine: ...And Introducing William Zabka

If there is any poignancy in Hot Tub Time Machine — and God knows there isn’t much — it lies in the notion of John Cusack going back in time and reinhabiting the body of his 20-year-old Better Off Dead self. Cusack, like his fellow icon of ’80s teen movie adorability Matthew Broderick, has somehow matured over the last 25 years into a puffy, shuffling sad sack, the living embodiment of the John Hughes maxim that when you grow up, your heart dies. (Your heart dies, and you put on about 25 extra pounds.) In almost every movie Cusack makes these days, you yearn in vain for a little of the old Lloyd Dobler spark, that wry Sure Thing smile, to peek through. In Hot Tub Time Machine, Cusack takes his current mopey screen image to its fullest conclusion: he plays a man so defeated by life that even when he gets magically transported back to 1986 during a pivotal weekend his younger self spent at a ski resort, he decides he’s obligated to do everything he did the first time all over again in exactly the same way so that the future isn’t disturbed.

But Cusack’s mission is complicated by the fact that three other guys have come along on this accidental time trip, and not all of them are terribly worried about triggering the butterfly effect. “That was an awesome movie!” proclaims Rob Corddry, an alcoholic loser who quickly gives in to the temptation to bang some snow bunnies and use his knowledge of the future to bet on football games. Craig Robinson, who in the future is so emasculated by his wife that he’s taken her name, tries his best to follow in the path of his younger self, but in a moment of weakness makes a hilariously blistering phone call to the nine-year-old version of his wife. Also present, in an underdeveloped role, is Clark Duke, Cusack’s 23-year-old nephew, who just hopes he can get through this weekend and still be born at the end of it.

Like The Hangover last year, Hot Tub Time Machine arrives in theatres on a wave of goodwill — it’s got a good cast and a fun high-concept premise bursting with so much potential for raunchy R-rated fun that you take your seat in the theatre ready to declare it the funniest movie if it even gives you half a chance. And somewhere around the halfway mark, you start to realize that the thing just isn’t as wild or hilarious as it could have been. It keeps chickening out of its most outrageous set-ups, the script’s references to ’80s culture and attitudes don’t have any interesting levels to them, these guys don't really seem like friends, and worst of all, there’s a really callous, cynical spirit to the way this movie handles the idea of these guys having to admit to themselves that they don’t like their future selves and wrestling with whether to improve them. There’s something very resonant (and potentially funny too) in the concept that the small decisions we make as 20-year-olds can spell the difference between success and failure, happiness or bitterness, as adults, so it’s disappointing that Hot Tub Time Machine chooses to waste its premise on a lot of barf gags and gay-panic jokes. And it’s doubly disappointing that the barf gags and gay-panic jokes aren’t at least a little funnier.

Not that there aren’t laughs here: Sebastian Stan makes a picture-perfect ’80s villain as a ski patrol douchebag named Blaine, and Crispin Glover has a very funny running gag as a bellhop with one arm in the future and two arms in the past… but for how long? But of course, Glover’s presence only makes you recall Back to the Future and realize what a beautiful, intricate, well-tuned engine of a screenplay Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale designed for that picture, and how satisfyingly all the pieces of the plot fell into place as it vroomed at 88 miles per hour towards its surprisingly suspenseful climax.

As funny as Rob Corddry is in Hot Tub Time Machine (and he does get to deliver the lion’s share of the film’s funniest lines), he’s playing a character type — the hard-drinking, politically incorrect, insult-spewing party animal — that I’m kind of fed up with. Hot Tub Time Machine could have benefited from having a little less of Corddry’s energy and taking Doc Brown as its guiding spirit instead. Hey, if you’re going to build a time machine into a hot tub, why not do it with some style? And would it hurt to have some sweetness too?