Babes and Bathwater

I'm usually a big sucker for movies in the “lovable loser” comedy genre but here's the thing: the losers in said movie have to be actually likable, if not lovable. They cannot be jerks, blowhards or generally unlikable people. They have to be the type of people you would root for in real life, not the type that would make you cringe if you found yourself sitting next to them at a party.

Granted, the bar for the lovable loser genre has gotten low over the last few decades and heaven knows there has been way too many movies in which the one likable thing about the comic protagonist is his affection for his grandma. But last year's Hot Tub Time Machine is so pathetic it does not even bother to include the grandma. Instead we get one suicidal loser who has done his best to alienate almost everyone in his life except two friends -- and his two friends, who are not all that much better. Along for the ride is one friend's fatherless nephew, who seems to be the one person in the group with a sense of humor and a genuinely likable personality. So naturally it is a running gag of the movie that he ends up getting dumped on through most of the movie by the suicidal loser.

Then the group gets the opportunity to go back in time to the 1980s via the time travel device mentioned in the movie title and alter history for their young selves. But unfortunately, they prove just as obnoxious in their 80s incarnations as they were in the present, and they not only almost blow their chance to change anything but prove themselves even less worthy of success than they were in the present.

It would be nice to pretend that this movie was funny despite all this but it was not. Most of the pop culture jokes concerning the 1980s were just old hippie jokes from the 1960s retooled for a different decade and to add insult to injury, almost every female character that the group encountered in the 1980s -- including a group member's sister! -- was depicted as being little more than a brainless bimbo. (Because apparently no other kind of female existed back in the 1980s as far as HTTM's writers were concerned.)

As a result, the film's happy ending made me feel as if I had just found out that the worst bully I knew from high school had won the lottery. Because, in effect, that was what happened. The most unlikable character in the movie stayed behind in the past to change things -- and ended up altering history in favor of himself and his chums. Which would not have been so bad if this was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it was not.

Oh, well. Perhaps it is just as well that the movie did not include a grandmother. After all, it is hard to imagine HTTM's writers being all that more respectful toward senior citizens.