For all its gleeful ridiculousness, “Hot Tub Time Machine” had some resonance. Nothing so profound that it couldn’t fit in with the crotch jokes: just some modest, on-target musings about how we can’t truly recapture the past. Apparently, the cast and crew didn’t get their own message. Five years on, nearly all of them are back for “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” a less-relatable sequel that doesn’t exactly work overtime imagining the future.
The last time we hung with incorrigible jerk Lou (Rob Corddry), musical softie Nick (Craig Robinson), and malingering sidekick Jacob (Clark Duke), they had just warped back from the 1980s, a trip rendered in minutest metalhead detail. Oh, and Lou had conveniently set himself up as the tech billionaire inventor of “Lougle,” and morphed Nick into a gold-record superstar in the bargain. Meanwhile, Jacob’s uncle, Adam (John Cusack, absent here), got his payoff in the form of true love, if not sequel money.
Catching up with the gang, we soon learn that the one thing Lou couldn’t temporally swipe for them was lasting happiness. He’s relocated Lougle HQ to New Orleans and is partying his way into oblivion, while Nick guiltily keeps churning out pop hits he’s preemptively cribbed from the Black Eyed Peas or Lisa Loeb. Cue a vengeful, unseen gunman’s bullet to Lou’s crotch (naturally), and the guys dive right back into the space-time continuum to save him, with about as much can’t-be-bothered setup as before.
Trouble is, rather than traveling backward and preventing the shooting, they accidentally skip ahead 10 years into an alternate future, getting caught up instead in a murder mystery. Jacob gives a breakdown of their predicament that’s straight out of “Back to the Future Part II,” right down to the explanatory blackboard diagram, but there’s (unintentionally?) no comprehending it. We’re just expected to roll with the trouble they get into with Adam’s goody-goody son (Adam Scott), including raunchy dude-on-dude gags — the cringey stuff we wish they’d skipped in the first movie, but somehow among the funnier bits here. (Christian Slater amusingly cameos as a game-show host emceeing some of the craziness.)
Compared with last time, the returning team of director Steve Pink and writer Josh Heald practically doodle the gang’s motivations and worse, their surroundings. A lot of the first movie’s appeal came from obsessive re-creations, like its flashbacks to Motley Crue debauchery. Here it’s mostly under-detailed touches like cargo kilts — although a glimpse at the future of “The Daily Show” post-Jon Stewart is serendipitously timely. Really, most of the imagination seems to go into an elaborate end-credits lead-in with the guys romping through US history. Maybe that’s the trip back they should have taken.
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Tom Russo can be reached at trusso2222@gmail.com.