The actor:	Craig Robinson
The character:	Nick Webber
The film:	Hot Tub Time Machine
The line:	“It must be some kind of hot tub time machine.”

Hot Tub Time Machine, in the grand scheme of (fog machine turns on, someone starts playing a harp) Cinema, is not all that much better than The Room. I’m not really a Rob Corddry guy, and this movie certainly did not help me become a Rob Corddry guy. It’s not a good time travel movie, which I’ll admit is a tough watch to wind, but that’s not an excuse for a mediocre picture. What this movie has is one line, one line that’s so incredible that I think it might even justify the existence of Hot Tub Time Machine on its own.

No brilliance is required to come up with a movie like Hot Tub Time Machine, down to the use of the hot tub itself. After all, the grandpappy of time machine stories (The Time Machine, really great job coming up with that title, Herb) is so intelligent because it recognizes that time travel and space travel are fundamentally different from one another. The time machine doesn’t move a centimeter, and it’s not built to move a centimeter. It’s built to move through centuries, and so the protagonist of the story sees London into the distant and then the far future. Time After Time, a movie so ludicrous in its premise that it makes Hot Tub Time Machine look as sober as Salesman, gets around the spatial travel by sticking the time machine in San Francisco when Wells arrives in the 1970s. It’s Back to the Future which I think we ought to blame for this conflation of space and time by using a car traveling at a particular speed to get from present to past and then back again. Since then, there’s been a slow pendulum swing back to the static object, or at least the semi-static one. Kate and Leopold and Palm Springs, to name two examples, use portals. Of course, Hot Tub Time Machine has the hot tub, which emphatically stays still and, of course, gets a little busted in its use.

There is a hugely important choice that the filmmakers had to make when they were putting Hot Tub Time Machine together. It was going to be a stupid movie no matter what. It was called Hot Tub Time Machine. Like one out of every eight jokes in this movie has to do with something related to penises. Then they decided to include the line, “It must be some kind of hot tub time machine,” which is a great moment in stupid ideas. It should be a hat on a hat. It’s not like Doc Brown shouting that they have to send Marty “back to the future,” because Doc Brown is a wild man and Back to the Future is a quippy title, not a dumb one. This is rubbing the audience’s nose into the premise, just begging them to roll their eyes and check out. You know why we don’t?

Craig Robinson is doing commercials for Pizza Hut. Craig Robinson showed up in season after season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine even as it tilted towards its ultimate fate as “Ted Lasso with cops in the midst of the cops doing something worse than beating Rodney King every two weeks.” Craig Robinson was on The Office in Seasons 8 and 9, to say nothing of having been on The Office after Season 3. But here’s Craig Robinson making a face at us through the camera, and it’s a face that is beaming two knotted ideas at us. The first? I dare you not to laugh at this thing I just said. You have paid for a ticket to a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine and I have just said the title of this film with a completely straight face that I am still holding. The second? Kill me.