Nick (Vince Vaughn) has traveled back in time. In the opening scene of Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, an inventor (Ben Schwartz, determined to earn his paycheck for a brief role by maximizing his per-minute mugging) tinkers with a time machine, which allows Nick to arrive in what appears to be the present day, from six months in the future. Nick would be forgiven, however, for assuming he’d gone further back—maybe as far back as the mid-to-late 2000s, when actors like Vaughn and his co-star James Marsden were staples of 20th Century Fox comedies like Dodgeball and 27 Dresses, while there was also a perceived market for caffeinated post-post-Tarantino shoot-em-up comedies like Smokin’ Aces or, uh, Shoot ‘Em Up. Such a trip could change the course of film history; maybe Fox’s post-Disney moniker as “20th Century Studios,” purveyor primarily of sci-fi franchises and straight-to-Hulu programmers like Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, is simply a space-time mishap.
But no, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice only looks like the most Ain’t It Cool News-hyped movie of 20 years ago. More than looking the part, the movie sounds it: Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski obviously loves dialogue, the back-and-forth rhythms of characters fussing over relationship nuances, colorful details, and pop-culture minutiae. To be more specific, he loves movie dialogue that knows it’s movie dialogue and refuses to hush its self-conscious movie-ness, bantering about until everyone in said movie sounds like a recent graduate of some godforsaken creative-screenwriting seminar. This movie has quirky dialogue that’s literally about quirky dialogue.
Vaughn deserves a lot of credit, then, for relaxing into the material, and not hyping it up with the relentlessness he might have employed back in those mid-2000s days. In this strenuously overwritten context, he’s a beacon of humanity, disguised as a thug with a partner-in-crime, Mike (Marsden), who worries that Nick might be preparing to bump him off. It would make sense; Mike has been sleeping with Nick’s wife Alice (Eiza González), though their betrayal is steeped in genuine affection for each other. (González notably does not hail from the two fiftysomethings’ 2000s-era heyday.) As it happens, Mike is correct about Nick’s bad intentions, at least partially. Future Nick arrives in the present remorseful over having vengefully framed Mike as a snitch in their criminal enterprise, resulting in his death. He travels back to stop Present Nick from going through with his revenge. Once explained (and bantered about), this mission pits the unlikely foursome of the title against the fearsome crime boss Sosa (Keith David) on the night he’s attempting to celebrate the release of his dopey son Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro) from prison. (Tatro’s character is largely extraneous, despite his fair measure of screentime.)
Though Vaughn manages to wring some genuine pathos out of the six months’ worth of additional wisdom and regrets that Future Nick has accrued, the time-travel element is ultimately more important to the movie’s marketing than its effectiveness. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is one of those would-be genre-mashers eager to call itself a sci-fi buddy-action gangster rom-com, despite not actually having much of any of them. The sci-fi is a shrug, the buddy chemistry is pro forma, the action is a frenzy, the romance is confined to a single cute black-and-white flashback, and that just leaves the gangsters—an extremely movie-ish group with hilarious (?) names like Dumbass Tony and Roid Rage Ryan. Oh, and of course there is the outrageous concept of a cannibal assassin who kills people for hire… and then eats them! Yep, they go there!
They also go nowhere. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes. All the better to brush off any hesitation over its descent into fashionable ultraviolence—naturally, the best way to save Mike is to kill, kill, kill with impunity!—as a failure to get on the screenplay’s wavelength. It’s easy enough to see how Grabinski’s movie could be briefly mistaken for genuine mirth; even without Vaughn’s weariness, Marsden and González are certainly professional enough to temporarily sell a few amusing bits and pieces, like an extended conversation about Rory’s boyfriends on Gilmore Girls. If the idea of pausing violence for a Gilmore Girls debate, or gags predicated on people not knowing things (like a mob boss who’s never heard of Winnie The Pooh or an adult man who’s never heard of chloroform), sounds like a genuine riot, maybe it is a wavelength issue after all. For those outside of the screenplay-seminar frequency, however, Mike & Nick & Nick Alice feels like the product of a frenetic desire to sell a bunch of movies at once, unburdened by any thoughts about what’s being sold or why.
Director: BenDavid Grabinski
Writer: BenDavid Grabinski
Starring: Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, Eiza González, Keith David, Jimmy Tatro
Release Date: March 27, 2026 (Hulu)
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