Hot Tub Time Machine 2 – Movie Review

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 – R
Release Date: Fri 20 Feb 2015

Rob Cordry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke and Adam Scott star in this sequel, with Scott replacing John Cusack. After Lou (Cordry) is shot, the gang use the time machine to try and go back and stop his murder but instead end up in the future – in a parallel timeline where Lou survives.

What I summarized above in a sentence, the movie spends 30 minutes getting to and explaining. This is a movie where the plot is very much secondary to wringing as much comedy from each scene as possible, even if the humor feels worn out before the movie gets going. More than half of the movie felt like lengthy improvised sessions where two or more of the characters stand away from any action and just insult each other or toss out as many jokes as possible.

When the movie DOES have a sequence with some plot or writing underneath it, it’s all played for shock value and is never grounded in anything close to reality. A particularly dreadful scene involves nothing but gay panic jokes where two characters are forced to have guy-on-guy sex as part of a game show. That’s the joke – non-consensual sex and how “funny” homophobia is.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is one of the laziest comedies I’ve seen in a long time, and not even a dependable cast can save it. The shock humor is mostly shocking in that it’s something that would have felt dated in American Pie in a movie released in 2015.

Jeremiah and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion in the car: