'Hot Tub Time Machine 2'is a Wash Out
John Cusack climbed out of Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and now we know why its contaminated with bad jokes.
I WONDERED why hit-starved John Cusack skipped a cash cow like "Hot Tub Time Machine 2." Then I saw the movie.
It's then that I deduced that Cusack had read the script, and that he has a degree of integrity.
That may seem like too much praise for someone who appeared in a movie called "Hot Tub Time Machine," but the original was funny in a memorably brutal way: Three middle-aged failures (Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry) return to the romanticized days of their youth, only to realize that each was already a doomed loser.
There were boorish jokes as well, but those are easier to sell when a movie is so ruthlessly self-critical of its self-pitying leads.
In "HTTM2," all of that irony is gone, and instead we have another dude-pandering comedy of boozing and boob-gawking.
This time the men (along with millennial sidekick Clark Duke) go to the future to figure out who has assassinated one of them in the present. Potential suspects include anyone who's ever met any of them; that's how unappealing they are.
The movie gets halfway to a good idea - giving us a glimpse of the future that edges toward "Idiocracy," wherein our utopian hopes turn out to be as wishful as our sentimental reconstructions of the past.
But "HTTM2" settles instead for topless girls, low-hanging drug comedy and endless pop culture reference jokes, some actually funny.
Most of the big gags, though, are so bad you can see transparent desperation in the face of the three leads, who will no doubt follow Cusack's example and wash their hands of this hot-tub franchise.