(IMAGE: Hot Water Films LLC)
Hot Water Films. 2021. Action/Comedy. 100 minutes.
RATING: 0.5 / 4
Aside from some genuinely impressive jet ski somersault
stunts during its opening credits – and repeated later in the movie with the
addition of a dinosaur costume – there’s not much to recommend Hot Water. A formulaic, not-especially funny underdog sports comedy, it marks the feature directorial debut of Larry Rippenkroeger, a former champion jet-skier and regular stunt double for Bruce Willis. Rippenkroeger clearly cares significantly more about this project than his usual boss has about any role in the past decade or so, but while he knows how to shoot a jet-ski race with a GoPro, his casting, direction of actors, and pretty much everything else associated with fiction filmmaking is basic at best.
Still, it feels excessively mean to tear into Hot Water too rabidly. It’s an easy mark, and there’s little joy in becoming the equivalent of an ’80s William Zabka bully. The movie’s harmless (unless it separated you from much money you’d rather have spent elsewhere) but you could add a “c” to the beginning of that adjective and it would be an accurate descriptor as well. It’s the sort of movie that names a towing company “Camel Towing,” and then has multiple characters call attention to the name just to ensure you couldn’t possibly have missed it. And anyone who’s that certain that that specific joke is so essential probably shouldn’t be writing a comedy.
Douglas Burnett (Michael Papajohn, whose IMDB page is heavy with uncredited extra roles) is a wealthy ad executive and country club fixture whose son Billy (Glenn McCuen) would rather ride around on jet skis, including in the aforementioned inflatable dinosaur outfit. (That spectators appear to briefly believe he’s a real dinosaur on a jet ski is a boldly weird choice, to be fair.) To get rid of him for the summer, Douglas encourages his son to compete as a pro, hooking him up with a hot sauce sponsorship. Tow-truck driver Danny (Glee‘s Max Adler), a former jet ski team mechanic, brings in his friend Jarid Harper (star of several Hallmark original movies and a former skier), an ex-champion who still has something to prove. Together, they try to go for the championship, against an obviously evil jet-skier named…Dick Hurt (Brian Combs). This is as funny as it gets, folks. Unless your sides split at irritable bowel-related scenes.
The various competition sequences supposedly take place at
different lakes, but they’re pretty obviously if not all the same location, at
least far less apart than the story has them. That’s forgivable. The race
footage at least feels authentic, and looks better than anything else here. Less
worthy of leeway is the extent to which this movie is populated with blandly
pretty people who aren’t especially memorable and can barely commit to a line.
Then again, when said lines involve, for example, jokes about a notoriously
horny middle-aged woman named “Mona Lott” (GET IT????), one can hardly blame
them. To the cast’s credit, however, they all mostly have nice abs.
It’s an old truism to write about what you know, and
Rippenkroeger has clearly attempted to do exactly that. It just seems that what
he knows may not be all that entertaining to anyone but himself.
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