So this is the story about four guys who are at unhappy stages in their lives and go back in time accidentally and find themselves caught in a mess where they kind of have to relive their lives, but also change them and one of them is disappearing because he's actually a kid and won't be born if they don't get back to the future. Did I say "Back To the Future"? I meant back to the present. But, yes, this is basically the raunchy guy-comedy version of BACK TO THE FUTURE.
So is it any good. Um, a little. There are some laughs, there are some little moments, a couple lines of dialog. The problem is there just isn't anything great. There are no BIG laughs and worst of all -- there ins't anything cool about it. And that's the big problem, because if you are going to call the movie something like "Hot Tub Time Machine" it can't just be a decent guy-comedy, it's going to have to be as smart and funny and cool as BACK TO THE FUTURE and the best of the best of Apatow all rolled into one. And this just isn't there.
Now that isn't to say that HOT TUB TIME MACHINE is horrible. It just isn't great. If you're trolling for a movie on cable or looking for something to rent, it'll do fine. But as movie theater fare goes, it just doesn't have enough oomph. (Notice how I didn't say "heat." Puns = death.)
*** maybe a rental ****
So let's compare for a moment since my dinner is cooling the twin accidental time travel movies, BACK TO THE FUTURE and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. What is it that BTTF does so well that HTTM fails at? Well, first is the characters. In BACK TO THE FUTURE, Marty McFly spends the entire first act being dumped on. His band is rejected from playing prom. His dad is a wimp. The family car gets totalled which means he can't take his girlfriend out on a trip that weekend. Notice a theme here: it isn't just that things are going badly, but that things are going badly that he can't control. He auditions, but is rejected. He tries to get his dad to stand up to the local bully, but his dad refuses. He wants to take his gf out, but the car is totalled. This isn't just about sympathy, this is about the life of a teen where there is so much you want to do, but so often feel like you don't get a chance because of things outside your control (like your parents saying no.) Even his going back in time was beyond his control. He is visiting the professor when they are attacked and he is trying to escape. Things spiral out of control back in time as well, as he screws up the past trying to save his father from a car and now everything is beginning to unravel, including his very existance. Now he must act to save himself by helping his father, and it is by helping his father in the past that he will affect (positively) the present. Pretty cool, right?
Now let's talk about HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. Here you have four guys whose lives suck. Dumped by girlfriend one of them pines for the high school girlfriend he dumped (the one who got away), another has a wife who is cheating on him but he won't leave, there's a geeky computer nerd nephew living in basement who doesn't know who his father is, and a fourth guy who is suicidal for some reason I don't remember. Because their friend is suicidal, they take him up to ski country for a weekend of partying in the place where they had this wild weekend and they go back in time, yada yada yada. Now right away there's some clear differences. While BTTF exploits that very nature of teen-ness of the lack of control, HTTM doesn't really exploit anything. They are just four guys who are in the dumps. So they accidently go back in time and...what? Of course, they try not to change things, then they do change things but so what? And that's one of the problems -- on that pure emotional level the movie just isn't doing anything. Now you can get away with that in a comedy if you have a lot of cool and a lot of big laugh funny (ala THE HANGOVER). But in THE HANGOVER they had some cool, crazy things happening -- like that lion and Mike Tyson. HTTM doesn't have anything like that. And it doesn't have those cool time travel moments like in BTTF when he realizes his dad as a teen is spying through his mom's window? And then the lines "Where are my pants?" "There, on my hope chest"? Or how people thought his name was Calvin Kline because it was on his underwear? BTTF had TONS of great little moments as well as big cool stuff -- like a time machine built into a Delorian and the sequence with the lightning storm to get him back to the present. There just aren't any cool moments like that in HTTM. The best is when one of the guys, a failed musician, plays a gig and rocks out a modern song for the audience (almost exactly like McFly does at the school prom in BTTF).
So in the end where BACK TO THE FUTURE really seems to deal with that teen situation of things out of your control, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE just doesn't deal with anything. That's why BACK TO THE FUTURE is a classic and HTTM is a rental.
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