'Hot Tub Time Machine 2' Circles the Drain

Sequels kill cult comedies. This is a well-established fact: “Back to the Future 2,” all the Ace Ventura sequels, and the “Hangover Part II”, among others. Much of the humor in cult films emerges from the synthesis of a thousand disparate elements, a synthesis that cannot even really be fully understood, much less replicated consistently. “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” completely fails to capture the spark of its predecessor, and its raunchy, frat-boy humor grows vile upon realization of the film’s complete lack of depth.

It is difficult to penetrate fully the abject failure of “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” without first understanding what makes the original so acceptable. “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a raunchy bro comedy about bachelor-in-perpetuity Adam Yates (John Cusack) and his friends: washed-up party animal Lou Dorchen (Rob Corddry) and mild-mannered, dog-spa grunt Nick Webber (Craig Robinson). The trio decides to take a visit to a ski-lodge they frequented in their youth, bringing Adam’s 20-something, illegitimate nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) along for the ride. The gang engages in a variety of amusing hijinks and misadventures and ultimately achieves self-discovery in the process. The film finishes with all its loose ends neatly tied up.

And then the sequel occurs. And somehow, it manages to be more phallocentric than Sylvester Stallone’s entire post-Rocky career—the entire plot is about penises. The characters are jolted out of their idyllic lives by the arrival of a mysterious assassin who shows up at Lou’s mansion and shoots him in the penis. The gang gets into the titular hot tub time machine to go to the future to stop the event from ever happening. In the future, Jacob has made a fortune by inventing a device called the DickPad. Nick has become something of an artistic joke, known primarily for the “Webber Shuffle,” a dance which consists of him tottering from foot to foot while “grabbing dicks off a tree.” The gang makes contact with Adam’s yuppie son, played by a now heavily typecast Adam Scott. Enlisting Adam, Jr., the group continues its penis-related escapades, most of which have little to do with actually discovering Lou’s murderer.

The film’s mistakes are many and glaring. First, the character of Adam Yates, Sr., is sorely missed. His absence forces once-co-stars Lou and Jacob into the protagonist slot. Unfortunately, neither of the characters, as sketched, has the emotional depth necessary to serve as the focal personality in the film. Remorseless party-animal Lou Dorchen is fine in small doses—say, as a foil to a more well-rounded Adam Yates—but as a protagonist he’s intolerable, abrasive, and shallow. Jacob proves himself to be little better, vacillating between downtrodden and submissive in the present to little more than an intensely douchey Lou clone in the future. The original film succeeded largely on the strength of the likeability of its competent cast; here, however, that same supporting cast is stretched too thin—forced to serve more complex roles without commensurate gains in character complexity.

The setting of the film, too, is lacking. The kitschy 80’s ski resort of the original film exuded plenty of charm. This film’s future, however, does not. It is sparsely populated with poorly executed futuristic clichés—Lou's reconciliation with a sentient, obnoxious, self-driving smart car serves as a large plot point—and, on the whole, is largely indistinguishable from the present. Jacob even comments on the how the future doesn’t feel that different from the “past”—a move that could come off as witty if it did not seem like an apology. The movie falls prey to this too often—it tries to be self-deprecating, but its efforts only highlight the clumsiness that characterizes it.

“Hot Tub Time Machine 2” attempts, like its predecessor, to tie everything up by the end of the film. The killer is found and then circumvented, Lou and Jacob discover the “true meaning of family,” and Nick solves his marital issues. The deeply unsatisfying final scene, however, has all the characters revert to asinine displays of the same pre-temporal-voyage-nonsense that precipitated the assassination in the first place. By the end of the film, the viewer has watched a tight-knit band of more-or-less unsympathetic caricatures dither about in a bland future, only to have their problems solved by happenstance. Any small, stunted beginnings of character growth are stamped out, and the gang returns to daily life, unchanged by the ordeal. The film is as circular as the flow of water in a grimy motel Jacuzzi and just about as likely to make you regret the way in which you have spent your last hour and a half.