Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice Is Time-Travel Action At Its Zaniest
Two Vince Vaughns make a right.
It’s the raucous party celebrating the prison release of Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), the golden son of crime lord Sosa (Keith David). The champagne is flowing, the boys are hollering, and Vince Vaughn’s intimidating gangster Nick is staring daggers into the back of the head of fellow gangster Mike (James Marsden). He’s so laser-focused on Mike that Nick barely notices his wife, Alice (Eiza González), come up to plant a kiss on his cheek and ask if they’ll be going to the after-party, or the after-after party. He gives a noncommittal answer, and an unhappy Alice breezily says she’ll have a girls' night instead, giving Mike a loaded glance. Thus, we’re introduced to our three players, whose night is about to go off the rails in bizarre and totally unforeseeable ways, thanks to a bit of time-travel tomfoolery.
If there’s a movie that could embody the word “zany,” it’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, a madcap time-travel romp that blows the lid off the sci-fi action comedy. BenDavid Grabinski writes and directs this Hulu movie, which is so bursting with wild energy and absurd antics that it feels like it’s deliberately pushing back against its direct-to-streaming release. At the very least, watching this one with a crowd makes it miles more entertaining.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice follows our trio as they, through the sci-fi twist of time travel, become a foursome. It happens when Mike, preparing the hotel room for a surreptitious meeting with Alice, hears a knocking at the door and sees Nick standing on the other side. But this Nick is wearing a different outfit than the one he had on at the party, and seems to have some urgent business that only Mike can help him with. They drive to Nick’s house, where Nick orders Mike to chloroform whoever is inside. The only issue is: the person inside is Nick. After a rough fight, inside Nick disappears, and the one who approached Mike reveals that he’s from the future. He had discovered the machine from one of their debtors, Symon (a perfectly utilized Ben Schwartz), and had used it to travel back to the day he’s regretted for months: the day that Mike dies. It turns out that Nick had framed Mike as the rat who landed Jimmy Boy in prison, making him the target of Sosa’s ire. And the reason that Nick betrayed his friend is clear — he had just discovered that Mike and Alice were having an affair. But having come to regret his decision, he has gone back in time to save Mike from being brutally murdered by Sosa’s assassin, and he’ll need Mike, Alice, and even Past Nick’s help to do it.
As its title suggests, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice centers on the trick of having two Vince Vaughns running around and throwing wrenches in each other’s not-so-carefully laid plans, but there’s a more impressive magic trick at play here. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, despite its time-travel conceit and somewhat convoluted set-up, is shockingly straightforward. It’s less a sci-fi thriller à la Looper than it is a Shane Black-style buddy comedy, wherein one of the buddies is actually just the same person, twice. And even when Alice joins the group as the fourth buddy, the movie never loses a step, making its crowded ensemble work for its increasingly absurd twists and escalating stakes.
Mike and Nick and Alice hatch a plan.
Grabinski, who cut his teeth on Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, is clearly a student of film as well as an unapologetic millennial, piling the script with as many cheeky pop culture references as possible, while employing as many ‘90s punk-rock needle drops as possible. Unsurprisingly, there’s a clear Edgar Wright influence on this film, though you can also see the effects of other beloved film-bro contemporaries: there’s a bit of a Shane Black acidity to the dialogue, crossed with a Community-style meta-humor that occasionally dips into, dare I say, a Joss Whedon-esque rhythm. The jokes are still a little unpolished, with a few bits — like one lengthy argument over the best boyfriend in Gilmore Girls — go on a little too long, but the film’s more awkward attempts at meta-comedy are saved by Vaughn, Marsden, and González’s talents and terrific chemistry.
González is used to working in this kind of sleek, high-octane thriller, having become a regular in Guy Ritchie’s stylish ensembles, but makes the transition to a more comedic role seamlessly. In the supporting cast, Tatro also needs to be mentioned as one of the actors to really nail the film’s specific intersection of clever meta-humor and dumb action comedy. However, it’s Vaughn and Marsden who prove to be particularly deft at balancing the film’s dry comedy with its bombastic action beats. The film’s action scenes in particular are pretty spectacular, with Vaughn and Marsden’s first hand-to-hand fight scene moving with such satisfying speed and brawny grace that you start to wonder why neither actor had been doing action long before this. Vaughn, who mostly gets to play the stoic tough man here, has been proving his dramatic and genre aptitude for years, but Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice feels like the first film in a while to fully realize Marsden’s action bona fides, while allowing him to show off his innate comedic talents.
There’s a bit of a messiness to Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, though it endeavors to make the chaos a feature, not a bug. It’s structured in punchy chapters (the party, the afterparty, and the after-after party), and frequently cuts to black-and-white flashbacks that interrupt the momentum. But despite some convoluted lulls, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a breezy, kinetically shot romp buoyed by its terrific cast. It feels like a strong mission statement from writer-director Grabinski. Though this is his second feature film, Grabinski proves that he’s a talent to watch, and one that will hopefully only become more polished and fearless as his career goes on.
