“Hot Tub Time Machine 2”

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 commits the two biggest sins of the dudebro comedy genre legitimized by the success of The Hangover series. The first is that this sequel exists at all. This film’s necessity comes courtesy of the uncanny way studios package their greed as easily consumable attacks on the viewing public’s fear of something different. It’s doubtful that the general consensus at theaters showing the superior original film was “Boy, I need to see a sequel to this! So many unanswered questions!” The box office made the studio want this movie more than you did. Do not let their whorish, ubiquitous marketing convince you otherwise.

I’ll leave the dissertation on greed to Erich von Stroheim; Hot Tub Time Machine 2’s more egregious sin is switching its focus to its most obnoxious character. When we last left Lou (Rob Corddry), he’d used his knowledge of current events and the Hot Tube Time Machine to alter the future of his buddies Nick (Craig Robinson) and Adam (John Cusack), his son Jacob (Clark Duke), and himself. Google became Lougle, fueling Lou’s megalomania with billions of dollars. Lou is a horrible person, and to the original film’s credit, it acknowledged this while balancing his antics with John Cusack’s character. Cusack’s absence in the sequel makes Lou the leader of the pack, and while I admire Corddry’s commitment to the role, Lou’s personality makes Hot Tub Time Machine 2 an endurance test.

Picking up in the alternate future defined by its predecessor, the film opens with Nick’s newest music video, a shot-for-shot remake of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay.” In a cameo that highlights how lazy the attempts at humor will be for the next 90 minutes, Loeb shows up to say “Why does that sound so familiar?” While she ponders that great mystery, we discover that billionaire Lou is hosting a huge bash at his Lougle-financed mansion. Jacob, the smartest character in both films, serves as Lou’s butler. The party serves as the reason for dragging out the Hot Tub: during Lou’s big opening speech at the party, somebody shoots him in the dick.

If my crude turn of phrase offends you, be advised that I’m directly quoting Josh Heald’s screenplay. Every five minutes or so, someone reminds you that Lou “got shot in the dick.” When people aren’t saying it, director Steve Pink is flashing back to the scene in all its gory splendor. Lou the Shotgun Castrato has his much-despised son to thank for keeping the time machine and its power source in pristine condition. So the trio leaps into the hot tub, which does what the DeLorean did in Back to the Future II.

Ten years from now, some jackass on the web will point out the exact date in 2025 when Nick, Lou, and Jacob encounter the alternate universe that exists as the alternate to the alternate universe they originally altered. Chevy Chase, reprising his role from the original, explains that the Hot Tub takes people “where they need to go, not where they want to go.” Since the 2015 version of Lou isn’t dead in 2025, Jacob deduces that the hot tub sent them forward because the killer came from the future. When Nick mentions that this sounds like The Terminator, Lou yells “everything reminds you of Terminator!”

This film’s 2025 is almost completely devoid of creativity. The one clever invention is a car that operates on its passengers’ emotions. The car is capable of murderous intent, but little is done with this premise. Instead, more time is devoted to drugs whose mundane hallucinations insult the word psychotropic and various electronic masturbatory objects that, of course, only work for men. God forbid a woman has any pleasure in this genre’s past, present or future.

While trying to solve a mystery so inane even Scooby-Doo would pass on it, the gang meets another Adam (Adam Scott), who is somehow related to John Cusack’s Adam. This Adam is a goofball whose innocence rivals Anastasia Steele’s in Fifty Shades of Grey, and on the day before his wedding, he joins in the search to find Cusack and save Lou. Along the way, he’ll be violated in terrible ways the film finds funny but the audience does not.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 continues the dishonorable tradition of using fear of homosexuality to wring nervous laughter from its presumably straight male audience. The problem with this film, and many others, is that it’s hypocritically obsessed with the gay sexuality it purports to mock. Gayness is always used for juvenile shame tactics, and the MPAA lets movies like this get away with it in ways a serious look at gay sexuality cannot. Here, characters are splattered in the face with semen from punctured testicles, someone accidentally sucks on his son’s masturbation toy, and in the film’s vilest grasp for laughs, two of the unwilling male protagonists are forced to have virtual-reality sex with each other on live TV. One of the participants refers to the act as being “raped with a Buick driven up my ass.”

None of this is remotely funny, nor is anything else Hot Tub Time Machine 2 has to offer, save one thing: As annoying as Lou is, he gets the film’s only laugh by singing, with Nick, a paean to Jacob’s nerdy tendencies. The song is repeated during the credits with full orchestration. The ending, which you’ve seen in the trailers and the commercials, promises another sequel I hope never gets made.

If the Hot Tub Time Machine takes you where you need to go to correct your mistakes, I’m sure it would take me back to the moment before I walked into the theater to see Hot Tub Time Machine 2.