Hot Tub 2 Is 'the Turd in the Jacuzzi'

Minus John Cusack, the gang from Hot Tub Time Machine is back for an equally ridiculous sequel in which the men hunt for a time traveler from 2025 who attempted to kill Lou, played by Rob Corddry. Its 14% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes is pretty bleak. Here's what they're saying:

• Chris Nashawaty at Entertainment Weekly says it's "so witless and unfunny and shoddily made it makes The Hangover 2 look like The Godfather 2." It's understandable why Cusack exited the tub. "Without him, though, the whole enterprise pretty much goes up in smoke." New leading man Corddry provoked "an almost physical reaction every time he came on screen—something between an outbreak of hives and a fit of dry heaves."
• "It's a parade of penis jokes—the film almost literally opens with the sight of male genitalia—interspersed with a half-hearted murder investigation," writes Michael O'Sullivan at the Washington Post. "If it has plot holes, conceptual laziness, and an overreliance on dumb-insult humor, the film at least seems to know it. There are lots of self-referential jokes that acknowledge its own stupidity."

• "Hot Tub Time Machine 2 leaps forward rather than backward in time and sort of makes one wish the world had ended while it was en route," writes John DeFore at the Hollywood Reporter. Adam Scott, who plays the son of Cusack's character, "fills the cast's likeability void nicely." But the film itself is "nasty entertainment whose pauses for laughter elicit the sound of crickets," DeFore says. "Someone should have pulled the plug."
• "The boorish, juvenile Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is the proverbial turd in the Jacuzzi—you can't pin down who’s responsible, but it's a floater that ruins the party," writes Brad Wheeler at the Globe and Mail. Scott brings "a straight-laced counterpart to the other guys' crass jocularity," but this is a "tired-trope flick"—which, perhaps most interestingly of all, predicts a black woman will host the Daily Show in 2025.

(More Hot Tub Time Machine stories.)