Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice’ on Hulu, an Eyeball-Crossing Time Travel / Gangster / Rom-Com Led by Vince Vaughn (And Vince Vaughn)

By John Serba

From the Time Travel Movies Make My Head Hurt File comes Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (now streaming on Hulu), a genre-smusher-together starring Vince Vaughn, Eiza Gonzalez, James Marsden and Vince Vaughn again. As the title implies, Vaughn does not play twins, because why would a parent who isn’t George Foreman give their offspring the same first name? But as my lede states outright, one Nick is from a different place on the ol’ timeline, and the movie – written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski, most notably the creator of the series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off – refreshingly doesn’t get too hung up on paradoxes and alternate timelines. In fact, the most troublesome component of this film is its squirrelly amalgamation of comedy, romance, sci-fi, action and gangster movies, which requires a bit of untangling. Now let’s see if it’s worth the trouble.

MIKE AND NICK AND NICK AND ALICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Is this guy Symon (Ben Schwartz) using a Commodore 64 to make a time machine? I wouldn’t put it past him, since he’s listening to a cassette he dropped in an old boombox and printing on a noisy dot matrix machine, which likely tells us he appreciates the way old ’80s things click and clunk and whirr. Because it’s not the 1980s, but the modern day, as we eventually learn when someone uses a smartphone a few scenes later, which is a better place to start with this daffy-ass plot. An IQ-deprived gangster named Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro) is the reason for this big party, which will continue to a 3x after party, and provide the movie with its chapter headings. He’s fresh out of prison, and his crime-boss dad, Sosa (Keith David), is committed to finding the rat in the org who put his boy in the clink eight years ago. No hurry, I guess? Anyone else concerned that a rat could scurry around and continue wreaking havoc during those eight years, or is it just me? 

It’s just me. Sosa tasks one of his capos, Nick (Vaughn), with ferreting out the weaselly little rat mole. Nick is tight bros with his underling, Quick Draw Mike (Marsden), and one of the amusing eccentricities of Grabinski’s script is the use of nifty nicknames like that – we’ll eventually run into Roid Rage Ryan, Dumbass Tony and Jackie Napalm, and be teased with, but never see, Bob the Tomato. Anyway, Mike wants to change careers to something less killy, but once he thought he was out, they pull him etc. etc. etc. It seems Mike would prefer to settle down with his romantic interest, Alice (Gonzalez), who happens to be Nick’s wife. Whoops, sure, but the marriage is loveless and defined by its bitter animosity now, so a kerfuffle was bound to happen regardless. 

Nick convinces Mike to do One Last Job with him, and root out the rat. This is about when Mike runs into Nick No. 2, who seems different. Nicer, maybe. More contemplative. This isn’t quite evident right off the bat, but he wears a turtleneck where Nick No. 1 garbs up in a suit that’s all sharp angles. And it’s obvious to Mike that this isn’t the same Nick, who explains, “This isn’t the first time I’ve lived through tonight,” the first in a variety of eye-crossing zingers that also include, “I’m you, and you’re coming with us” and “I need your help in the past, which is today.” The story also ropes in a “cannibal assassin” named The Barron for reasons that resist logic, but at least opens the door to some solid jokes and a casting reveal that might tickle fans of ’80s trash acshun flix. I’m getting a bit turned around here, which is a clear product of this bonkers (but not quite bazonkers) plot, which takes itself about as seriously as you expect it to, namely, not at all.

Photo: ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There’s probably some post-Tarantino witty-dialogue gangster comedies I could reference (Get Shorty maybe), or time travel movies that don’t take themselves too seriously (we just saw Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, and Back to the Future is the gold standard influence). But a few years ago, Vaughn turned up in a similarly modestly inspired lark of a genre mashup, Freaky, which used his performance as the sweet spot between grim serial killer films and wacky body-swap comedies. 

Performance Worth Watching: Sorry Marsden, the Marsman, Marsarino, you’re always funny but almost always second- or third-billed to someone like Vaughn, who generates pathos and comedy by playing subtle iterations of the same character (and this is a world where Michael B. Jordan wins an Oscar for playing twins in Sinners). 

Sex And Skin: Scantily clad exotic dancers in a strip club.

Photo: ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection

Our Take: MaNaNaA (note, rhymes with “banana”) is a cheery fun good goofy time, and if that’s too many superlatives, well, it’s in the spirit of this a-bit-much movie. But it’s loopy and playful in spirit, freewheeling with its ratatat joke assault but tight in its tone and style. Considering the array of colorful characters, relentlessly gabby dialogue, diversions into wacky sci-fi and cockamamie plot twists, Grabinski’s direction often feels like an act of simultaneous juggling and plate-spinning, and the result feels like Guy Ritchie’s Hot Tub Time Machine, with all the positive and negative implications of that, although the former ultimately outweigh the latter. (What can I say, I enjoyed the dopeyassedness of Hot Tub Time Machine a little more than most.)

The movie’s essentially an Xennial-coded One Crazy Night saga of betrayal, regret, redemption and violence rendered funny with gangbangers delivering extended riffs on pop culture (e.g., a decidedly noncasual convo about Gilmore Girls), relentless needle drops (Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’ is forever representative of douchebros worldwide), cute-cat reaction shots (ORANGE GUY ADORBS!!1!!!1!!!!!!1) and a shoot-’em-up climax set to Thin Lizzy and Andrew WK that’s roughly Looney Tunes gone gun-fu. Personal taste dictates whether this is annoying or endearing, but Grabinski treads the dividing line carefully, and nurtures an affecting emotional core within Vaughn’s typically snappy, but thoughtful performance. During a climax that surprises by lingering longer than expected, it lands a jab to the heart, but avoids touchy-feely postmodern-emo therapyspeak. Which is to say MaNaNaA is a throwback of sorts, a they-don’t-make-these-as-much-as-they-used-to-20-years-ago movie that will probably do quite well in the streaming realm for a few weekends – deservedly so. 

Our Call: The borderline-tryhard flippancy of Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice may be divisive, but my aging Xer take on it is, more of you will take it than leave it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.