The trailer for Steve Pink’s “Hot Tub Time Machine” started off making it look like an easy movie to loathe. Four guys on a road trip, wallowing in Eighties nostalgia, sight gags and potty humor galore. Next. But the trailer kept doubling down on its absurdity until Craig Robinson finally speaks its title, its plot, and ultimately its best joke: “This must be some kinda...hot tub time machine”.  Robinson looks into the camera, breaking the fourth wall with a deadpan look (right out of the playbook of his TV series, The Office), catapulting the film into a dimension impervious to criticism.

Moviegoers unconverted by the trailer will hate “Hot Tub Time Machine”. Those tickled by it will find that the movie delivers on its modest promise of a buddy comedy located between a sweet farce and a shoot-the-moon riot made for teenage boys. In other words, Pink made a film that spastically runs the gamut of John Cusack’s career in the 80s, from “Better Off Dead” to “Say Anything”.

Pink’s best accomplishment in "Hot Tub Time Machine" is also the most surprising. Although the story is of course heavily saturated with jokes about the 80s—leg-warmers, cassette decks, some senile old B-movie actor playing the President on TV—Pink uses the Reaganite kitsch as scene-setting first and nostalgia second. The time-travel gimmick is always front and center but the humor is not always derived from mere time-tourism. For instance, when Lou (Rob Corddry) suckers a bar full of gamblers into taking bets on the famous Broncos-Browns playoff game in 1986, it could have been any game.  Jacob (Clark Duke) keeps running into his slutty mother in the ski lodge, but a teenager’s horror at seeing his mother in the hot flush of her skankier days is a trauma that cuts across generations. Nick’s teary-eyed phone call to his wife accusing her of adultery—she is only nine years old in 1986—is hilarious, but could have been used in any time travel comedy.

On this level the film is a wild success. Writers Scott Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris, presumably with lots of ad-libbing from the excellent cast, got a lot of mileage out of the time travel conceit, treating it as if it were a loose idea for a series of sketches. Lou’s ill-fated trick in the bar during the playoff game takes one extra, inspired, gross-out turn that trumps a related gag in “There’s Something About Mary”. Crispin Glover, one of many nods to “Back To The Future”, plays a bellhop, Phil, whose fate is to lose an arm. At several points Lou and the guys wince as they witness a series of bizarre scenarios unfold, each more ridiculous than the last (perhaps Phil’s funniest appearance is the first, when he is supposedly one-armed: Pink doesn’t even attempt to conceal the fact that Glover has simply tucked his “missing arm” inside his jacket).  The convoluted series of events leading to the sordid coupling of Lou and Adam’s sister, Jennie, gives the story an icky twist worthy of “The Empire Strikes Back”. Nick’s second chance as a musician, delighting the lodgers with a taste of a funkier future, is a funny reminder of how sublime music can make us feel.

As with most road trip/bacchanalian weekend comedies, the movie stands or falls on the chemistry between the guys. Of the four leads, Corddry owns “Hot Tub Time Machine”, from the moment he arrives onscreen drunkenly air-drumming in his car (he even pauses to flip the ’sticks’ in the air) to his final turn as Vince Neil’s replacement in Motley Crue. He is fearlessly foul-mouthed and vigorously vile, yet Corddry succeeds in making Nick slightly sympathetic, showing flashes of geeky charm in offbeat little moments like knocking over a bar stool as a gesture of manliness (“out of the way, bar-stool!”). He’s a downtrodden guy who never recovered from the bullying he took from the stock rich kid douchebag at the lodge.

Cusack has the straight guy role and plays it well; in his best scene he’s barricaded himself in the hotel room, pumping his body full of every drug he can find in an act of tantric self-pity. Robinson is the coolest cat of the four. He’s believably mushy when he can’t escape his wedding vows even with a free pass.  The sight of him crying during sex with a hot groupie is one of the saddest scenes ever committed to celluloid.

The fourth member of the quartet of schlubs is Clark Duke as Jacob, Adam’s nerdy nephew. Jacob is an awkward, puffily androgynous, iPhone-addicted teenager who suffers shock after shock on this debauched tour through his parents’ past. Here, again, Pink struck the right comic balance. Jacob’s punchdrunk horror flares up long enough for a laugh before receding back into the movie’s Lou-driven momentum. Almost any number of detours could have been taken to mine the jarring contrivance of a contemporary teenager adrift in the 80s.

Thankfully, Pink limits the contrast to a few excellent scenes, such as Jacob meeting a girl and not knowing how to contact her without email or Facebook. “Find me”, she purrs. “That just sounds...exhausting”, he responds in befuddlement. (Later, trying to get Adam to leave his new love interest April behind, he mockingly calls out, “Tell her you’ll fax her”.) He holds up with aplomb despite being the butt of Lou’s sarcastic ire as well as a few other asides (twice Chevy Chase’s mystical repairman mistakenly refers to him as a girl). Duke was essentially handed the Michael Cera role and he played it just about perfectly—an unobtrusive kid allowed a spot on the varsity bench.

One mark of the film’s quality is the way there seem to be more gags than there actually are. The conceit is so silly, and Pink shows such fine command of the material and the actors, that the humor in “Hot Tub Time Machine” finds a groove with the time travel mumbo-jumbo and seems to multiply its core insanities beyond the limits of the film. It’s delightful to watch a director surrounded by an embarrassment of comic riches who manages to pluck more than just the low-hanging fruit. A spin-off movie detailing Lou’s wild ride as a venture capitalist/hair metal singer sounds inviting, as does one following Nick’s music career, Jacob’s perilous contact with the pre-Jacob 80s, or Adam’s clock-cheating romance with April.

None of these possibilities makes ‘Time Machine’ more than it is, which is a derivative gross-out dude comedy squarely rooted in the dorm-room realm of beer bongs, dick jokes, and bodily excretions, but they do make for one of the more inspired iterations of the genre.  Too many lesser films would have stopped at a man cleaning shit out of a dog’s ass with his hand; ’Time Machine’ enlivens that awful joke by naming the dog Bono and having him rigidly constipated after swallowing the key to its owner’s BMW.

The neat layering in that joke is a key to an interesting inflection in the film’s journey back to the 80s, to wit, its subtle historical commentary (what is Bono, that lion of the 80s, but a mutt constipated with success?). The positive nostalgia in “Hot Tub Time Machine” mainly skims the lost glories of youth, a theme germane to any time travel story about thirtysomething guys. The styles and mores of the 80s, whenever the decade crops up as a focal point, are firmly disparaged.  The villain in the piece is the standard snotty rich kid named Blane. For some filmgoers this name will forever conjure Ducky’s acid remark in “Pretty In Pink”: “Blane...? That’s a major appliance, that’s not a name”.

Blane is a rabid right-winger and, one gathers, a stalwart Young Republican in the Alex P. Keaton mold. His favorite movie is “Red Dawn” and he takes it upon himself to out the guys as Russian spies. He represents power and money at the popular Kodiak Valley ski lodge, which is packed and jumping in 1986. But when the film opens, back in 2010, we see that the lodge is a shell of its former self. The nearby town is shuttered and the lodge itself is falling to pieces. It is a disaster site, mirroring the downward spiral of Adam, Lou, and Nick falling apart in their late thirties. Somewhere between 1986 and 2010 their lives, like the ski lodge, took a bad, bad turn. The Me Decade didn’t suck in terms of fashion and music alone, the film conveys, it also planted the seeds for much nastier suckage to come.

When the guys return to their lives in 2010, they find their once shabby lives transformed. Lou has made himself into a billionaire playboy and helped his friends share in the bounty. Adam is now happy and prosperous. Nick is a big music producer with his own studio. (Jacob benefits from Lou’s success directly, but his story is secondary to the grace, of sorts, Lou visits upon Adam and Nick.) This is played for laughs, yet if one imagines a sudden hijacking of genre, the moment could have blown open an existential abyss calling to mind “Rip Van Winkle”: Lou has arranged the best 24 years of Adam and Nick’s lives—but he has also stolen them. Adam never lived the best years of his romance with the love of his life, while Nick is an absentee “success” made rich by theft rather than talent. But they don’t mind one bit.  They act like they’ve won the lottery, even toasting Lou in the film’s last scene.

Because Lou accomplishes this by building his empire solely as a “visionary” unconnected with real work—Lou grasps the idea of Google solidly enough to position himself as its leader, for instance, but lacks the expertise to engineer the site—“Hot Tub Time Machine” parodies the ideal neoliberal fantasy: instead of undertaking the toil and trouble of enacting serious reforms of capitalism to recover from the disaster of Reaganism, sleight-of-hand manipulations of the financial markets at the managerial level solve all the problems. The sacrifice is effortless, instantaneous, and involves nothing more than sliding into the frothy caress of a hot tub; hot tubs, of course, having the shape of an O.