Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010)

A telling cultural placeholder -- a fitting affirmation of just how far we haven't come since the '80s. Manages to mix the homophobia, misogyny and racism of yesteryear with all the new ways we've discovered to oppress people in the two decades since. I'd say Craig Robinson ought to be ashamed of himself, but he has already proven himself a man without shame.

The film's premise is, actually, not without potential. Sad sack middle-aged guys trying to relive their glory days accidentally get time-warped back to them. If the film had gone from there to become an indictment of the vanity and privelege of male mid-life crises, as well as an attempt to slap in the face the entire idea of rose-tinted nostalgia for the '80s and all the awful things about that decade, all while embodying the tone and feel of an '80s comedy (the one thing the actual movie does get kinda right), well, that actually sounds like a movie I'd want to see -- a lot. The movie has a banquet of satirical subject matter to work with, and all it ends up with is some jokes about neon and slack-jawed Red Scare jokes that were likely tired before the '80s had ended.

And the actual plot involves none of this premise. Instead, it is the exact opposite. It is about how, hey, now that we're old and we see all those mistakes we made, wouldn't it be great if we could go back to our young, hot, virile bodies, but with the life experience we have now? We would rule EVERYTHING. So it becomes an extended, unfunny exercise in male wish fulfillment. John Cusack, in the present, is reeling from a recent divorce in which his Bitch Ex-Wife(TM) took everything and left him a shallow husk of a man. The solution, in the past, is to meet a "quirky" girl with almost no personality and get her to fall in love with you despite the fact that you are exhibiting personality traits in life with both A) a mopey, recently dumped creep ex-boyfriend and B) a legitimately mentally ill person who believes he is from the future. There is literally no way a young, successful writer for a music magazine would ever be interested in him. Craig Robinson, in the present, is an emasculated cukold too much in love with his wife to confront her about his knowledge of her affair. The solution, in the past, is to call his 9-year-old wife-to-be on the phone and scream obscenities at her until she cries. This move proves so emotionally scarring, that when he returns to the future she would never dream of cheating on him (though, of course, she doesn't know it was him). The entire movie is like this. Men behave in such disgusting, self-serving, completely inhuman ways and are then rewarded. We are supposed to buy into their ending as being a happy one, because, I guess, that the only thing really wrong with the world is that men don't have enough control over it.