Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

When you’re scrolling through Hulu’s selection of movies, and you come across Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, you might mistake it for a familiar blend of gangsters and assassins with notes of humor and a love triangle—well, a love square. At first glance, it looks like another Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), or the early work of Guy Ritchie. But writer-director BenDavid Grabinski has something weirder in store. For his second feature, after the intriguing but ultimately disappointing Happily (2021), Grabinski takes what appears to be a tired action-comedy template and splices it with a time-travel movie. That alone offers an interesting variation, I guess, but the movie is unique for its idiosyncrasies within its various genres. Besides being a fun mash-up, it also boasts an extended debate about Rory’s best boyfriend from Gilmore Girls and several lingering shots of an adorable cat who looks pissed off about being in this movie. 

It opens with peppy energy. In the title sequence, Ben Schwartz plays a loner scientist building a time machine and having a ball doing it, until someone materializes from a blinding light and kills him. We learn more about that later. In the meantime, the gangster Sosa (Keith David) throws an elaborate “Welcome Home from Prison” party for his son, Johnny Boy (Jimmy Tatro, once again typecast as a dimwit). In attendance are Mike (James Marsden), a hired gun who’s tired of killing people for a living, and Alice (Eiza González), his secret lover. Why secret? Because Alice is the ex-wife of Mike’s best friend and hitman mentor, Nick (Vince Vaughn), who wouldn’t be happy if he found out. So when Nick comes asking Mike to join him on a last-minute job, Mike worries that his friend knows about his romance with Alice and plans to kill him. 

That’s not the case. Mike soon learns the target is… Nick. Not the Nick who enlisted him for the job, but another Nick. You see, there’s Future Nick from six months from now, and there’s Present Nick. Future Nick traveled back in time to prevent Mike from meeting a horrible fate, which, Future Nick admits, he helped orchestrate after learning about Mike and Alice. As revenge, Future Nick made up a story about a rat in Sosa’s operation: Mike. Sosa called in The Barron, a cannibal assassin who eats his victims, to dispose of the informer. Regretful over his actions and the loss of his friend, Future Nick hopes to save Mike’s life this time and knock some sense into the embittered Present Nick. Six months wiser and more emotionally stable, Future Nick also exposes Present Nick’s secrets, such as the Nicks’ secret love shack, where they keep an orange tabby cat named Kingpin and a collection of bowling balls.  

For time-travel movie buffs, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice plays by Looper (2012) rules. When Present Nick is stabbed, a scar appears on Future Nick’s leg. But this isn’t like many of today’s mindbending examples of the genre, with multiple timelines and theoretical physics. Early on, the time machine is destroyed, leaving Future Nick trapped and without hope of a do-over. For rom-com fans, the movie features some genuine chemistry between Alice and Mike, complete with a meet-cute dancing montage in a flashback. The movie is mostly a comedy, with action scenes interspersed. There are goofy characters included just for laughs. Arturo Castro’s nice-guy gangster, Dumbass, feels like Grabinski asked him to reprise his performance from Road House (2024). Stuntman and actor Lewis Tan plays a character called Roid Rage Ryan, who actually seems like a nice guy. I also enjoyed the running gags about chloroform and the ruthlessness of Canadian gangsters, as well as the increasingly absurd series of afterparties for Sosa’s son, who has sexual performance anxiety after six years in prison. 

For all of the movie’s silliness, Grabinski makes some distractingly bad and odd choices in his execution, whereas a more straightforward presentation may have better suited the material. The action scenes are your typical blend of highly choreographed hand-to-hand combat and John Wick-style gunplay, albeit with an occasional juddery slow-motion effect that proves distracting. One or two applications of this fuzzy slow-mo might have been excusable; Grabinski uses it in every action sequence. As in Happily, the director renders flashbacks in black-and-white; however, much of the movie elsewhere teems with LED lights in fashionable blue and purple hues. None of this is meant to be taken too seriously, and Grabinski and editor Tim Squyres slice through the tension by cutting to Kingpin several times, with the cat shown wagging his tail with an intensity that looks like he’s about to turn feral. 

Grabinski’s clunky formal choices often deflate the script’s pleasures, as though the director didn’t trust his writing. Moreover, the movie relies a bit too much on ironic needle drops to sustain its energy, setting an action scene to “Morning Train (Nine to Five)” by Sheena Easton, a strip club sequence to Dave Matthews Band’s “Ants Marching,” and an emotional scene to Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” All of this absurdity ends up surprisingly touching by the end, with a bond formed between the four titular characters. Still, I laughed a lot throughout Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, and it’s evident between his two features so far that Grabinski wants to play with genre, injecting funny details that enrich the sometimes formulaic story choices. (In both, for instance, I smiled at characters who wear a “Cronenberg for President” shirt.) Although not every choice works as intended, it’s worth checking out on Hulu.