What do you do when your friend tries to (allegedly) kill himself and your girlfriend has just left you? Why, you band together with your distanced but still best friends and you take a trip down memory lane--in this case, to a ski lodge where you were once champions of the lady world. And heck, while you're there, ain't no harm in all hopping naked into a hot tub with one another and getting totally wrecked. Or is there? Watch out, because if you're not careful, you might just wake up with a slammin' headache in the year 1986!

Read more after the jump!

Hot Tub Time Machine, by Steve Pink, the guy who brought you Accepted and wrote High Fidelity, is a film that's so spectacularly absurd you can't help but just roll with it. Space time continuum? What's that? Who cares! Once you just buy into the fact that these guys have activated a secret function in a hot tub with an active ingredient in some strange illegal energy drink, the better you will be for it. Beyond the insane premise the film isn't overly original, but that's hardly the point.
 When you get together such a charming and humorous cast all an audience can hope for is a fun time in the theater. And with America's sweetheart John Cusack coupled with Craig Robinson and Rod Corddry, you couldn't ask for a better rag tag bunch of guys to root for and laugh along with. The only problem is they have the never non-irritating Clark Duke in tow as Cusack's nephew. Duke can't detract the funny when these guys are firing on all cylinders, but he certainly interrupts the flow. These guys were all brought back to a fateful night in 1986 that shaped the directions of all of their lives. Now they are faced with the dilemma to either follow along on their previous paths and insure everything stays the same or wreak havoc with the chaos theory and see if they can step on a butterfly and make Hitler president...or something like that.

The film isn't without it's faults and that's okay. It has been designed to be a confectionery delight, best consumed and then forgotten about. The film seldom makes sense, the jokes don't always hit as hard as you'd like, and pretty much everything you see and hear is forgettable.  
But just like you don't remember all the twist and turns of a roller coaster, it doesn't mean the ride wasn't totally worthwhile, and for that I would recommend Hot Tub Time Machine to you. It's juvenile, it's silly, but it's bound to pull out some chuckles.

--Greg MacLennan