John Cusack is a smart, smart man. He didn’t need a time machine to know to stay far, far away from this one.
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“Hot Tub Time Machine 2” is the latest “Dear God why” sequel to hit theaters based on what came next for this group of imbeciles why accidentally invented time travel. Everyone but the oh so wise John Cusack are back to take this water for another spin, but this time into the future, or is it the past, or maybe an alternate future… or alternate past… or the future of an alternate past? Actually I don’t think anyone, including the writers, really know or care, as I’m pretty sure they just wanted an excuse to squeeze as many genetalia jokes into 90 minutes as humanly possible. Cause that’s pretty much all that’s going on here.
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Which is disappointing considering 5 years ago, when the original came out, that silliness and crassness seemed secondary to a surprisingly heartfelt and entertaining story about regret. Here the only thing I found worth even slightly lauding was the envisioning of future technology, which seemed fun and inventive in a Minority Report meets Jr. High humor kind of way. Of course humor may be too strong of a word, cause honestly this movie just isn’t funny.
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Which is sad. There are really funny people in it, and the first Hot Tub flick at least felt genuinely humorous much of the time, so what happened. It’s like Hollywood has this idea that for a comedy sequel to work you have to amp up the gross out and imbecilic humor factor instead of just remembering the cleverness and character work that truly allows the laughs to flow. Not to mention, maybe throw in a story we can actually follow, or would actually want to. We saw the same thing with the Dumb and Dumber sequel. As if being aggressively infantile is what made it work. And this movie goes all out to be as offensive as possible. One of my kids asked me the definition of the word crass the other day, and I swear if it wasn’t for the fact that it might warp his little brain, I would have just shown him this movie as the living definition. This movie is the very embodiment of lame, immature, and relentlessly masculine comedy, again with very little actual comedy, so that everything that they think is funny is actually just pushing the audience away in disgust.
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Overall, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is the worst kind of sequel, missing everything that worked about the first and emphasizing everything that didn’t. Though it’s always nice to see what the future might hold, no amount of gadgetry could save this juvenile mess from being anything more than an unfunny parade of gross out jokes and confusing plot movements. Hot Tub Time Machine 2 goes floating down the drain with a D-