About a century ago in movie years, Hot Tub Time Machine buds Adam, Nick and Lou (and Lou’s son Jacob) used hot water, massive amounts of alcohol and stupid dumb luck to whisk their way back to the 1980s. They took their knowledge of the future back with them and used it to get drunk and have lots of sex. Oh, and they also built their own empires.
Now they’ve re-lived their way to 2015. Nick is an R&B impresario who’s had an impressive string of, ahem, original hits. Lou is an Internet mogul and inventor of the search engine Lougle. Jacob is still the hapless son he always was, only now his dad’s loaded. Or maybe that should be Louded. Adam … well, we’re not sure what’s up with Adam these days. He’s not in this movie.
Anyway, just as these man-boys are about to embark on the next chapter in their life’s jumbled journey, Lou is shot in the crotch by an assassin with a shotgun. (Yes, of course in the crotch. It is a sex comedy.) Fortunately, the universally hated but massively wealthy Lou just happens to have that old hot tub tucked away in a back room ready to be filled up again.
So before the dude can expire from blood loss, the guys get blazingly wasted on booze and cocaine, then fire up their whirling-water time-mover. Their mission, if they can remember it? Go back to the past, again, and find the assassin who’s planning to puree Lou’s nether region with buckshot. Explicably, though, they end up in the future. Not to get technical on you, but it all has to do with the time stream folding in on itself and creating a new timeline existence in which 2025 is really the past to the 2015 that they once kn—
Oh, who cares!? There’s really nothing more to the movie than getting flabby bodies naked and doing nasty, nasty things to one another. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but if it’ll keep just one reader from watching this ferociously foul flick, then it’s worth every word.
Does it make it all better because Nick finally apologizes to his wife? Or that Lou asks his wife to join him in a 12 step program?
In the midst of a fevered drug trip, Adam’s son, Adam Jr., calls his betrothed to tell her he is “a god!”
Like so many other low comedies today, this one hammers away at the outer boundaries of the ratings system. And then it gets out some dynamite and lights the fuse.
Among the myriad messes given front-and-center screen time is a man who fully exposes his genitals in a window near a woman’s face. Two men are forced to participate in “virtual reality” sodomy. (We hear their sexual sounds and listen as the they discuss the particulars of the event afterwards.) Lou has sex with Adam Jr.’s fiancé. (They keep most of their clothes on, but we see graphic movements.) A painting depicts a man having sex with a tiger.
A bent-over man pulls down his swim trunks. (We see him from the side.) In a long, panning scene, the camera closely examines a near-naked (topless) woman as she walks in and passionately kisses a guy. Busty women strut around, caress male partners and/or dance around in skimpy bikini-like outfits in party scenes and a music video. Several people examine an autoerotic device with an iPad-like design.
A lengthy gross-out sequence involves nanobots, a swollen scrotum (seen through pants) and a hypodermic needle. Raw, rude and/or obscene jokes are traded about sexual disease, genital size, sexual infidelities, bodily fluids and rape.
A man’s head is blown to smithereens (meaning a mass of spattering blood and shattered bone) by an attacker with a gun. As mentioned, Lou gets shot directly in the crotch. Somebody’s hit in the face. Somebody else is tackled and strangled. During a drug-induced delusion a life-sized teddy bear goes on the attack with a butcher’s knife. Two guys are hit with 10,000 volts when they refuse to participate in a reality TV show.
At least 120 f-words and close to 40 s-words dominate the dialogue. Repeated references are made to male and female genitalia. (We hear everything from “c–k” and “d–k” to “p—y” and “t-ts.”) Uses of “a–,” “h—” and “b–ch” join the putrid pack. God’s and Jesus’ names are mangled and abused about 20 times, God’s getting mashed up with “d–n.” There are obscene gestures made.
Beer, wine and hard liquor (Jell-O shots included) are all used to wasting effect on a fairly regular basis. In one case the heavy drinking results in hallucinations. Snorting cocaine is a pretty prevalent party activity, too. Lou tosses back prescription pills from a cup. Adam Jr. has a psychotropic ladybug patch applied to his neck which sends him into a frenzied drug trip.
Racist gags, potty humor, giggles about suicide and misogynistic “mirth” are splashed onto audiences throughout.
Hollywood has developed something of a foul-film tick these days. It manifests itself by way of a tissue-thin “lesson” layered onto the end of a fetid farce. In this case, each of the hard-drinking-snorting-groping-vomiting-farting-sodomizing-and-seuxally-violating guys suddenly realizes (for a brief moment, anyway) that he should be a better friend-husband-dad. That’ll make the world a happier, shinier place, they figure.
I guess the thought is that the average moviegoer needs at least some tiny shred of moral cover after freely choosing to wade through and drink down two hours of what amounts to raw sewage.
The first Hot Tub Time Machine movie was gunk-in-the-drain-pipe putrid. This sequel doesn’t even try to ooze past the clog. Its unimaginative and totally pointless script leaps from one filthy non sequitur to the next with the crazed abandon of a sleep-deprived improv artist. Not even a bucketful of chlorine could clean up this flick, and not even penicillin could cure the sickness it spawns.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
