"Hot Tub Time Machine" was a silly '80s-infused throwback, hit-or-miss to be sure, but charming on occasion and generally diverting. Though it tended toward the bawdy and prurient, director Steve Pink and writer Josh Heald brought enthusiasm to a premise that was as dumb as it sounded and a script that never quite lived up to its potential. A sleeper hit in theaters and a success on home video, the film has now received a distaff, low-rent follow-up that seemingly no one asked for. Pink and Heald are back, as are most of the original cast members (minus, very oddly, headlining star John Cusack), but whatever magic its predecessor held, it has been entirely vanquished by the mind-numbingly desperate "Hot Tub Time Machine 2." Any way one spins it, this is a bad movie. It's cheap-looking. It's asinine. It's dull. It's thoroughly unsatisfying. And, at 93 minutes, the proceedings earn a whopping two laughs tucked inside a tidal wave of misery.
In 2010, best friends Lou Dorchen (Rob Corddry), Nick Webber (Craig Robinson) and Adam Yates (John Cusack) found themselves traveling back in time with Lou's grown son, Jacob (Clark Duke), to relive a raucous ski weekend from 1986. When they returned to the present, the space-time continuum had altered their realities. Five years later, Lou is a hard-rock-superstar-turned-billionaire-Internet-mogul (the lead singer of Mötley Lüe and now the creator and CEO of Lougle). Nick is a multi-platinum recording artist in his own right who has swooped in to steal hit songs before their would-be artists could write them. Jacob is floundering and directionless, treated by Lou as a servant at his parents' mansion. As for Adam, well, he's apparently away on an "experiential journey" and glimpsed only in photographs. When Lou is mortally shot in the penis by a mystery assailant, Nick and Jacob pull him into the stolen hot tub time machine he is hiding in his home to travel to the past and stop this tragedy from happening. Instead, the trio find themselves in 2025, a future existence from which they come to suspect Lou's murderer came. Also joining in their search: Adam Yates-Stedmeyer (Adam Scott), Adam's estranged son who hopes to find the dad he never met so that he can invite him to his impending wedding.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
