‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’ Review
Sometimes, just a little seasoning can make a familiar dish enticing. Armed with a clever twist on the crime genre that keeps audiences on its toes, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a surprisingly heartfelt, introspective science-fiction and gangster film. Its time-travelling premise provides surface-level thrills, evoking a comedic version of Rian Johnson’s Looper, but BenDavid Grabinski’s latest film, much like Johnson’s, is far less concerned with the mechanics of time travel and more with the moments from the past that we feel responsible for changing. Cribbing from a wide swath of cinematic influences that don’t always work, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice manages to be refreshing in its execution—even if it still struggles to feel like more than just the movie-of-the-week.
It’s a pretty solid movie-of-the-week, though. A hitman, Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), is about to leave his job behind to start a new life with his boss’s wife, Alice (Eiza González), but over the course of one night, Mike’s plan is upended when his boss, Nick (Vince Vaughn), travels back from the future to kidnap his present self and help Mike escape the ire of Nick’s boss, Sosa (Keith David). It’s a slightly complicated web of criminal interests made more difficult to untangle through the time travel plot, but it surprisingly comes across as much simpler in action. The foursome—including two Nicks—are simply forced to work together to help survive the night. Through a series of fun cameos, violent action, and witty dialogue, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice continues to put slight spins on its ambitious swing, resulting in something familiar but just clever enough to be entertaining.
It’s the attention that Grabinski’s screenplay draws to its inspirations and fixations that pulls the audience deeper into the action. Grabinski is obviously a devout follower of pop culture and has a very clear vision for bringing all his different obsessions under a single umbrella. The soundtrack, in particular, is evidence of someone with an eclectic, modern palette employing it at the exact right moment for it to elicit either a chuckle or a “hell yeah!” Obvious references to Hong Kong action cinema, with its framerate changes during action beats, might confuse certain audiences and enthrall others, while an extended conversation about Gilmore Girls could be the glue that brings the alienated audience back into the fold. When I’m clocking an Andrew WK needledrop and a Joseph Trapanese score (probably best known for scoring The Raid films), it became clear that Grabinski was on my wavelength. It’s a menagerie of stylistic flourishes and screenwriting tics that create a transparency between the writer-director and the audience, not unlike Shane Black’s filmography, with which this film shares an undeniable similarity. A bit about the use of chloroform is humorous and seemingly superfluous, but it actually helps us understand how certain characters live their lives. Subverting expectations in a crime comedy is not new, but Grabinski understands that self-awareness is not the only ingredient needed for something to be refreshing: it needs to mean something in the grand scheme of the narrative.
In this case, most aspects of the film feed either into the time-travel plot or the frayed relationships at its center. Flashbacks presented in black-and-white fill in the blanks of most relationships, but it’s actually the conversations, the concerns, and the actions taken by characters in the moment that most illustrate what they mean to each other. Mike and Alice feel like a couple on the fringes of a vortex, like Nick, and Nick does feel like someone whose act-first-think-later mentality is preventing others from getting too close. The physical representation of Nick’s future self interacting with his present self brings a blunt form of catharsis that is actually sweet. However, the relationship between Mike and Nick is surprisingly underwritten in many respects, despite its integral role in Nick’s conscience. Perhaps it’s a lack of chemistry between Marsden and Vaughn, but the two simply never feel like old friends. Nick and Alice, however, do feel as though they have a past that has been long abandoned.
Its effectiveness at conveying each relationship is ultimately the film’s secret weapon. It can share wonderfully quiet, sombre moments alongside pop culture references and humorous asides because each character truly feels important to the others. While Mike and Nick might not have the strongest definition of their past relationship, the core reason for Nick’s care for Mike turns even the most boilerplate history into something driven by genuine concern for one another. Even characters like Sosa’s son, Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), or Dumbass Tony (Arturo Castro), have relationships with other characters that define their significance within the narrative.
It helps that every actor is pretty charming in this, including Marsden, who has never quite stood out among a cast unless playing a significant role. This might be his most affecting performance, thanks to working off of Vaughn’s incredibly chatty but enchanting demeanour. Vaughn feels at home in this kind of role, continuing to refine a mid-career shift into dramatic roles that play to his affability. True Detective, Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete, Bad Monkey—these are roles that recognize an approachable quality to Vaughn but make him pricklier than we’re used to from his comedic heyday. González continues to be a formidable presence in action movies like this (her ongoing streak of Guy Ritchie performances and in Michael Bay’s Ambulance has solidified this), leaving a very dependable performance in her wake. No one is particularly remarkable, but nothing in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice seems to be aiming for more than just pleasantly surprising.
There’s a comfort in knowing that movies like this are still being made. While Grabinski’s film might feel slavish to a very specific era of action-comedy, his encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture is weaponized in such a way that there’s a little extra flavour for almost any audience. It can feel a bit stale, but when it hits the right notes, there’s a hint of something timeless underneath all the slight smarminess and referential humour. It never matures enough to be more than just a hint of it, but it’s definitely there—which is both frustrating and appealing. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice isn’t the next big action-comedy hit, but it plays with its safety net in a way that other films of this genre seem frightened to consider. In a streaming-focused entertainment landscape, that kind of attitude is a welcome change of pace from its formulaic contemporaries.
