Sometimes you watch a movie, and instantly, it starts speaking to you. That happened to me when I sat down to watch the new Hulu film, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. The film begins with a character, for no good reason other than “Why the hell not?” singing one of my favorite Disney songs of all time. I won’t say which, but it’s a deeper cut for sure, and not something most people would think to randomly open a movie with. But writer-director BenDavid Grabinski did just that, and he immediately hooked me in.
That sense of “Let’s do this just because it’s cool and fun” permeates throughout Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. It’s a mad mash-up of genres, ideas, music, and action that probably shouldn’t work, but absolutely does, as long as you can keep up.
In the film, Vince Vaughn plays Nick, a gangster who discovers a time machine and uses it to go back to one of the most crucial nights of his life. On that night, his friend Mike (James Marsden) and wife Alice (Eiza González) both went through some major, major life events because of Nick, and Nick wants to set things right. The only problem is, there are two Nicks in this timeline, so Future Nick recruits Present Nick to help everything go down.
The story and relationship between that core four (well, three) are the main drive of the film, but it’s also juxtaposed by a complementary story filled with a who’s who of excellent actors. Keith David (The Thing) is Sosa, the boss of the crime family they’re up against. Jimmy Tatro (Scream 7) plays his son Jimmy Boy. Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek) is a cop named Sam. Arturo Castro (Tron: Ares) and Lewis Tan (Mortal Kombat) are thugs named Dumbass Tony and Roid Rage Ryan. Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog) is the inventor Symon (yes, with a “Y”), and Stephen Root (Office Space) is a mysterious assassin.
Yeah. It’s a lot, and that’s the major vibe with Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. Grabinski [whom, full disclosure, I’ve known personally for several years] puts his actors and the audience into a spiral of joy as we get cool action scenes, laugh-out-loud comedy moments, pop culture references, and even some romance and heart sprinkled in there too. It’s incredibly rewarding watching these great actors go through this story, especially because all of it is so original. We’ve never seen a time-travel gangster action comedy before. So, we never quite know where things are going. It certainly helps, too, that all those actors have no qualms about getting incredibly silly (or sappy) whenever the situation calls for it. And it calls for it a lot.
Plus, all of it is set to a fantastic mix tape of needle drops that are either completely on the nose or totally random and weird. Both of which work. And, ultimately, that’s also how we felt about Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice as a whole. It’s a very unique, out-there movie with so much hilarious randomness that at times, it feels like a bit too much. Like it could go off the rails and never come back. But that never happens. Eventually, everything comes together beautifully, leaving us with a film that’s so entertaining and sweet, you can’t help but bask in that glorious excess and passion.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is now streaming on Hulu.
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