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I enjoyed this movie more than I had any right to enjoy it. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to relate this movie to something in its "league". I know some people love Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I Love You, Man, but I found them to be just "alright" with a few good moments. I'd probably put HTTM just above those two in terms of my enjoyment. It wasn't nearly as funny as The Hangover, but it had a similar vibe with the 4 guys / road trip / crazy adventure. Laughs: The beginning was pretty slow, but it picked up after the first 15 or 20 minutes. There are a few really funny moments that have been rolling around in my mind since I saw it a couple days ago and still crack me up. I liked Chevy Chase's few moments, as well. (Cast is on IMDB, but spoilered just in case you don't read any of that). Acting: Pretty mediocre, even for a comedy. I always enjoy Craig Robinson, though. Plot: Trailer tells you exactly what it is about. No surprises. Also shows some funnier parts of the movie, but the exposure didn't hurt the comedy, IMO. Recommendation: 3/5 Squeaks by with just "slightly above average" for me. If you are in the mood for a comedy with some friends, I'd recommend this as a good distraction. Don't go in with high expectations and I think you'll enjoy yourself. It's my gut feeling that most of you will probably enjoy this movie more if you just wait to rent it.
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Feb 20, 2010 05:52
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 19:16 |
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I just left a sneak preview showing of this movie. I love it! It was a laugh from end to end. This movie rates higher than The Hangover and clearly above Sarah Marshal (which I truly enjoyed). I am going to go 5 stars in the 'college age buddy adventure genre' even though they aren't college age.
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Mar 2, 2010 05:30
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I just came back from a screening of this movie, HTTM. After watching Hangover just last year, I doubted that I would see another comedy like that for awhile. Just the sheer stupidity of the movie made it funny. In my opnion the trailer doesn't do the movie justice, when fist saw the trailer, I was underwhelmed to say the least, so I walked into the cinema with low expectations. Perhaps that's why I so thoroughly enjoyed it. The acting was alright, nothing to write off about, but each character played thier part right. HTTM takes aspects from various movies to make the final product. It has the whole road trip feeling with the 4 guys going on a trip. Hangover with the sheer comedy. I left the theater with alot of great quotes, and scenes from this movie. Defenitly give this movie a try. I'd give it a 4/5. Funny as heck, plus I got free pop, popcorn and a T-shirt!
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Mar 9, 2010 18:09
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This film has a dumb title in the same vein as The 40 Year Old Virgin which was a hilarious and fun film. This one works in a similar way. It has a lot of ridiculous over the top gross-out humor combined with good story. We have 3 friends, Lou (Rob Cordury), Adam (John Cusack) and Nick (Craig Robinson). Lou is an insecure bastard who treats his friends terribly, but they’re all he’s got. Adam and Nick have both strayed from the group of friends because they became committed to a job or a relationship. They all come back together when it seems that Lou has attempted to commit suicide (I’ll let you see the film to see how this happens). In order to help Lou they decide to go to the the ski resort they used to frequent in their high school days and they take Adam’s nephew along. The guys with nephew in tow arrive and realize the place is run down and a shadow of its former self. They decide to make the best of it and jump in the hot tub. After a huge alcohol and drug binge they wake up and it’s 1986 and it’s all due to the hot tub (time machine?). They’re suddenly their 17/18 year old bodies (they see this in a mirror ala Quantum Leap). What follows is a hilarious trip through 1986 where the guys must decide if they should do the same things they did or if they should change things up. The story is actually touching and interesting. The gross out gags are well timed. By the end of the film I cared about all these characters, even Lou (Rob Cordury). My sides actually hurt from laughing at some points. 4/5 http://filmicbrevity.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/hot-tub-time-machine-its-literally-a-hot-tub-time-machine/
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Mar 30, 2010 17:30
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This movie was mediocre at best. It felt like they just chose a wacky title and made a half-assed movie to go along with it a la Snakes on a Plane, except SOAP actually had some funny moments. The humor here is bottom of the barrel, probably targeted to high schoolers or frat boys or those guys who wish they were still frat boys. It's a mix of weak stereotypical 80s pop culture references and dumb gross-out gags that made me kind of want my time back. Other than being pretty pretentious, I'm a regular 23 year old guy, and I laughed a grand total of 1 time during this film. The people I went with didn't laugh much either. Kept me watching but not really amused - 2/5
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Mar 31, 2010 04:31
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You know the part in the trailer where Craig Robinson looks straight at the camera and says "It must be some kind of...hot tub time machine"? That isn't just for the trailers, it's actually in the movie. 5/5
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Apr 2, 2010 12:13
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I saw this last night and really enjoyed it. I didn't even know that Crispin Glover was in the movie, so that was definitely an added bonus. The whole movie seemed like a comedy/spoof/homage to Back to the Future and cheesy 80s ski resort style movies (John Cusack??), which I love. 5/5.
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Apr 4, 2010 15:21
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1/5 This movie was just all over the place. Lazy script, lazy direction, boring one dimensional characters, and a heavy reliance on gag humor. Honestly it just wasn't that funny. The few times I did chuckle were heavily overshadowed by all the moments that I felt it was just trying too hard to be funny and coming up massively short. This seems like a movie that stupid people would find funny. Kind of along the lines of Date Movie or Epic Movie.
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Apr 5, 2010 00:33
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4/5 I went into this knowing nothing but the name and that it was about time travel. I really only watched it because it was the next one to start at the movie theatre. It was pretty funny, I was laughing pretty much the whole time after the first 15 minutes. The jokes weren't high brow at all, so if you need a really witty comedy, look somewhere else, but if you are looking for a funny if immature movie, you could do much worse than this.
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Apr 6, 2010 15:37
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1/5 I enjoyed both Back to the Future, and The Hangover, so combining them should be a great idea, right? Wrong. The film did manage to provoke a smile and a chuckle from me through a few scenes. However, I just think most of the jokes wore out their new car smell and pretty much dragged on without a purpose.
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Apr 11, 2010 13:38
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This movie was better than I thought it would be, but that's not saying all that much considering I thought it would be pretty bad based on the previews and title. Rob Cordury gets to play an entire movie as his Daily Show persona, and has most of the good lines. Craig Robinson and John Cusack are also good in their roles, and really make this movie feel like a throwback to all the old stupid comedies of our childhoods. Some of the jokes get tired quickly, but I wasn't demanding a lot from this movie and it stayed fun and relatively funny throughout. 3.5/5
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Apr 12, 2010 17:52
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This movie was loving awful. Needs less rhetoric about the value of friendship and more FUNNY STUFF. 1/5
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Apr 13, 2010 21:32
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It's a great goofy ride. All the characters are very likable. I saw it twice and I will probably see it again. 4/5
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Jun 6, 2010 23:29
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Awful awful and more awful. Genuinely unlikeable characters, unfunny, lowest-common-denominator humor. The entire movie can be summed up in the following: "HEY GUYS, REMEMBER THE 80s? WEREN'T THEY WACKY!?" Throw in a few fart/boob/etc jokes and make it a wrap. I am far from finding a fart joke to be unfunny, but when the entire movie relies on them without even making a riff at itself for being so dumb, there's very little to stay entertained by. The drug usage/references were awful and did nothing for humor/plot other than to say, "Wow, I'm so high!" I realize that this is not supposed to be a brilliant film given the name, which is deliciously stupid and ripe for self-parody, but throw us a bone! I feel ashamed for John Cusack, who I actually like in his other roles in films like High Fidelity, which is the whole reason I went to see this in the first place, other than the name. 1.5/5, for the one bit with the arm loss with Crispin Glover. Unfortunately, the payoff for this running gag is incredibly underwhelming. Still not as groan inducing as Avatar though!
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Jun 7, 2010 17:10
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Just saw this movie on a rental. It was the unrated edition, so I don't know how much that may have changed things, but there were a few things that bugged me. I really wanted to like the movie, and I didn't dislike it, but it seemed to fall flat for me more than a few times. Initially, I thought this movie was going to be about four friends traveling back in time via hilarious and on-the-nose plot device so that the writers/director would have an excuse to make that curious 80s hallmark: the ski movie. Those movies were only possible in that bizarre moment in time and space, so I thought the idea that they were using time travel to make one was awesome and rather clever. It would have given them tons of as of yet unmined material to send up. I thought they were also going to be doing a bit of a Back to the Future thing as well, which would have been great and had a lot of comedic potential. However, they squandered pretty much all of these things in favor a weirdly paced "friendship is the best" movie with a ton of predictable frat humor. There were a lot of vomit/fart/tit/jizz/whatever jokes, and they can be fantastic if they're done right, but it seemed like these were just thrown in out of laziness most of the time. One of the most frustrating things was that all the characters in the movie acted like "the little bitch." One of the reasons The Hangover worked so well was that it absolutely nailed the character dynamic. Each character was a larger than life version of a specific personality trait that one can see in all their friends. Your friends aren't necessarily that way all the time (it's much more likely that everyone has all of those qualities and simply adopts them at various times, usually favoring one over the rest), but everyone can think of the friend who is most often "The Cool Guy," "The Weirdo," "The Mediator," "The Little Bitch," etc. Hot Tub Time Machine desperately needed to decide which character was which, because they were all indistinguishable "Little Bitches." Going with the "but you can't mess up the timeline!" plot is, at this point, a really tired trope. It is also inherently not that fun or funny, and thus best saved for dramas. No one wants to watch a bunch of guys safely follow the same boring and emasculating footsteps that made them miserable to begin with. On top of that, everyone KNOWS by this point that any movie that follows that trope is inevitably going to subvert it. Rather than make us watch all the characters sit around complaining and not having any fun until the very end of the movie where they go ahead and subvert the trope ANYWAY after harping on how they can't the whole drat time, the writers should have said "gently caress it" and cut to the chase. It's much more fun watching a group of friends bond by "getting it right this time" instead of nonsensically adhering to the same dumb poo poo that ruined their lives the first time. Chevy Chase's character was also frustrating, because he was largely pointless and, since he wasn't used (or at least wasn't used well) to comically subvert the "wise old knowledge guy" character, he was just a regular "wise old knowledge guy" with the added bonus of being useless and distracting. A much better movie would have run with the "no matter what you do, you're going to be miserable and your life won't change, so at least TRY to have fun" angle that they touched on and then completely ignored. That way you have them loving with everything out of a sense of detached, "nothing can happen to me" nihilism, which would then of course solve all their problems because it's a comedy movie. Pros: Some good laughs, some good ideas, funny to see a pretty decent snapshot of 80s alpine culture. Crispin Glover. "WHAT'S GOING ON, WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? OH MY GOD ARE YOU RAPING!?" Cons: Feels like a phoned in first draft that was too afraid to do anything actually ballsy. Every character is a frustrating pussy. Cusack's love interest comes out of nowhere for absolutely no reason and is poorly, barely developed. I honestly thought at first that she was supposed to be some kind of counterpoint to the hot tub repairman character, encouraging a little entropy and fun like a cosmic imp. This would have been significantly more interesting. All of the potentially very funny leads are terribly underutilized. This movie was also desperately lacking in emotional context. 40 Year Old Virgin, The Hangover, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, etc. have taught us that a little heart and earnestness can go a long way, even in an absurd comedy. 3/5 A comedy that at least tries to be a little more post-humor and weird than, say, Miss Congeniality or something. It wanted to be The Hangover or an Apatow flick, but it lacked the audacity and commitment (or coherent story with characters you care about). Decent rent if you're with your buddies and have time to kill. I think smoking a LOT of pot would make this movie more palatable on the whole.
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Jul 4, 2010 06:33
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