Stars: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Chevy Chase, Clark Duke, Sebastian Stan, Crispin Glover 99 mins

★★★

SOME titles like Hot Tub Time Machine, tell you exactly what to expect.

This is indeed a film in which a hot tub is a time machine, taking four friends back to 1986 to give them the opportunity to make the same mistakes again.

I’d like to tell you this is a deep, philosophical treatise on living your life and learning from past errors. But it isn’t. This is a raucous, bawdy, foul-mouthed comedy. As such, it delivers in much the same way that one of last year’s surprise hits The Hangover did.

Former best buddies Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson) and Lou (Rob Corddry) are reunited after a drunken spree by one of them is mistaken for a suicide attempt.

Together with Adam’s geeky nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), they go for a weekend at the ski resort where they reached turning points in their lives in 1986.

Convincing themselves that they’ve travelled back in time isn’t easy, but Nick has a surefire way. “What colour is Michael Jackson?,” he asks one of the Eighties revellers. “Black,”

comes the reply, confirming they have indeed travelled back a quarter of a century or so.

Hot Tub Time Machine succeeds as a rowdy comedy in the style of those Eighties movies like Porky’s. But it may make you wonder what’s happened to John Cusack’s career, coming after the disaster movie 2012.