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 In cinemas Thursday [MA15+]
Director: Steve Pink
Runtime: 95mins.
Somewhere in the noughties John Cusack’s career started to suck thanks to too many shitty rom coms and a really bad disaster movie. Hence it seems very fitting that he’s now revisiting the decade that made him so endearing in the first place. Of course if it were John Cusack the actor going back in time and stopping himself from ‘acting’ in Serendipity or 2012, I would have given this movie five stars straight off the bat.
Instead Cusack plays a deadbeat insurance salesman, Adam, who has just been dumped by his girlfriend while his nephew Jacob plays online games in his basement. His friends are worse off, Nick (Craig Robinson) is domineered by his wife while working a dead end job and Lou (Rob Corddry) is a self-destructive party animal who almost accidentally kills himself.
The guys decide to go back to the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort, a place that holds significant nostalgia for them. Unbeknownst to them, the hot tub is actually a time machine, and they are whisked away to the year 1986 while getting drunk in the tub. Nostalgia turns into harsh reality once they realise their teen years were a rose-tinted mirage. There’s AIDS, Reagan is in power and, worst of all they have to re-live their awkward teen years without changing anything in the past so as to not disturb the future.
There is a poignant story in there somewhere, amongst all the jokes about how these friends have lost touch with one another, but really I had more fun watching them toss time travel ethics out the window as they started using their knowledge of the future to take advantage of the timeline.
Enjoyment of the film may also be tarnished by the fact that when the men are transported back in time, only the people in the era see their teenage selves, or when we’re looking at them in mirror. Thus the audience is subjected to images of 40-something year-old men pulling a reverse Mrs. Robinson.
Yes, the story is incredibly dumb, but most of the jokes stick. There’s scatological humour, bare flesh and awesome ‘80s tunes aplenty if you’re into that sort of thing. Playing like an amped up episode of Futurama, the focus is on the jokes rather than the personal journeys of our four protagonists. The price of admission is worth it just for Crispin Glover, who takes on one of the best roles in his career, (well better than Alice In Wonderland).
***½
ELWOOD LEE
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