Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

The odd exception aside (The Empire Strikes Back, Evil Dead II), sequels eat 50-pound bags of dicks.  They're either the same movie over again only bigger and dumber, or they try to go a totally different direction and skull fuck everything you loved about the original.

And once a generation or so, when the moon is in the seventh house, cocaine prices are at a three-year low and Cashgrabus, the god of Hollywood whoredom, is at his most powerful, a follow-up manages to catch both types of sequelitis and threatens to tear apart the very fabric of space-time with its flabbergasting fucktrociousness.

Behold Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

Here's a movie that shamelessly rips off the original while somehow also leaving out everything that was even remotely funny about it.  Instead of going back in time to a pivotal salad days weekend, HTTM2 whisks Lou (Rob "Cut The" Corddry), Nick (Craig "Danger Will!" Robinson) and Jacob (Clark "Marma" Duke) 10 years into a depressingly shittily-conceived future to try to solve the least interesting murder mystery since the last time you played Clue with a bunch of sugar-addled 6-year-olds.

Gone are the amusing pot shots at the the Reagan Era, the wink-wink references to classic 80s flicks and cameos by the likes of Crispin Glover, Lizzy Caplan, Lyndsy Fonseca and Cobra Kai's own William Zabka.  Worst of all, I guess John Cusack, the best part of HTTM, would say anything, change his identity 2012 times - and be better off dead - than appear in this (Grosse Pointe) blank.  Sure thing.

In reality, Cusack says he wasn't asked to reprise his role as Adam.  Director Steve Pink claims the offer was made, but Cusack didn't want to go tubbing again.  Honestly, I don't give a fuck which is true.  All I know is that without him HTTM2 has as much chance of being a winner as Ellen Degeneres would at a cocksucking contest.

With Cusack gone, the focus of HTTM2 shifts to human septic tank Lou.  Lou was slightly less than completely unbearable playing second fiddle in the original, but putting him front and center is like devoting an entire Star Wars film to Jar Jar Binks.  It should never, ever fucking happen.

Though it was way better than a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine had any right to be, HTTM was no classic.  Compared to HTTM2, however, it was Michelangelo's David having a three-way with the Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Venus in the middle of the Parthenon warmed by a bonfire of Picassos, Klimts and Monets.

I want my two (ok, eight) dollars back.

February 22, 2015