Still better off with Better Off Dead

I have a long, ongoing debate with my friend George over the status of film comedy. It began in the darkest days of comedy -- the Adam Sandler/Jim Carrey years when shit jokes were considered the highest form of wit -- and centered on a basic thesis: the best comedies were entirely derivative. Lost were the days of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ghostbusters, Caddyshack and even There's Something About Mary, comedies that met the following criteria:

1. Inherently funny to anyone regardless of education or taste. Some people might like it more than others or less than others, but its humor was so genuine, anyone with even a sliver of a sense of humor would find it funny. (No To Die Fors allowed.)

2. Original in concept and approach.

3. Driven by its performances and characters instead of site gags.

Instead we were left with the likes of Old School, a fine, funny movie, that succeeds based on the performances of some good comedic actors. It took a familiar, tried plot, and inserted some talented actors and more or less worked. But it's Animal House, only less so.

Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't advance the cause much. Like The Hangover, its premise is tired, but on the strength of its performances and a willingness to devote some time to character development, it manages to feel fresh for two hours even if it isn't. It's at least encouraging that comedy writers have moved beyond gross-out humor (even if there is a shit joke here, too) and "funny" things being done to people and have begun to let the characters be funny and know they're being funny.

But there's still something hollow about Hot Tub, which may have been the point. For everything good in the movie -- Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Crispin Glover and his right arm -- overshadowing it all is the presence of John Cusack. I grew up with -- and still rate among my favorite movies -- Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, Say Anything and The Sure Thing. That Lane Meyer could end up with the crazy cute French baseball fan chick in the end has been as reassuring to me as an adult, actually, as it was as a teenager. Cusack of the '80s was the perfect role model. He wasn't Ricky Smith or Charles De Mar but he wasn't Roy Stalin, either. He was just normal, and he could still end up with that crazy cute French baseball fan chick just because he played the sax.

Now, he's an insurance salesman and the only thing can save him is a time machine. As an adult -- in character and as an actor -- he's pretty blah, and all the hope and promise of the '80s are gone. Sure, he hasn't gone as far as Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson into the realm of weirdness and overacting. He's just not interesting. Maybe that was what producer Cusack and his director buddy Steve Pink -- who did make Cusack interesting in High Fidelity -- were going for, the realization that Lane Meyer and Lloyd Dobler and Hoops McCann and Walter Gibson don't get to stay with the French chick or the valedictorian or Demi Moore or Daphne Zuniga. They get comfortable, become insurance salesman because they have no skills other than their adorable normalness and get dumped. Meanwhile, the girl ends up Roy Stalin or Ashton Kutcher in the end anyway.

Hot Tub Time Machine was a fine movie -- and yes, the '80s were awful; we get it already. But while I was hoping to find a movie that would live up to the comedies of my youth, it may actually have ruined some of them.