There are a lot of movies that pass for comedy these days which ply the same kind of jokes as Hot Tub 2. I think of them as "Loser Comedies", where a 21-st century version of the likable loser rambles through a serious of haphazard interactions with the world - the rest of the characters seemingly oblivious to what kind of behaviour this person is engaging in - setting up a dichotomy of audience expectation and the "reality" in the film.
The "Loser" comedy is a classic form - you can find it going way back to Charlie Chaplin silent films. Only instead of pulling one over on the bad, fat rich guy, now loser characters like Lou are fornicating with people's mothers, getting you to look at someone's penis, peeing in someone's shoes (a joke Chevy Chase pulled out in an interview while remaining completely deadpan back in the 80s).
But when its given a Millennial spin - the outrageous loser character immersed in a PC world of supporting characters who not only turn a blind eye to the behaviour but enable it, that is where many audience members get turned off. For Hot Tub 2, I was laughing at Lou's antics for a while, but as there was not a single person trying to seriously reign him in (not with a PC "No Way!", but an actual punch in the fact), instead his friends were just literally "bending over to take it in the A$$" for him. I think the writers were aware of this problem and tried to make up for it with the shotgun blast at the end of the film, as well as the somewhat satisfying one in the middle of the film (but that satisfaction is pulled out from under our noses pretty much immediately).
The only other thing to note is that perhaps the big-picture idea for this sequel went something like: we had good success with a parody of the 80s ski B-movie involving present day time travellers, let's do a parody of "tossed into the future" 80's B-movies (Freejack kinda the only thing coming to mind right now, although technically its a 90's movie) using contemporary heros. That's all I got....
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scabab
9 years ago
They should have kept it set in the 80's.
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pritch636
9 years ago
Right
We can all relate to the past.
That was a big fun factor of hot tub 1.
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