Back in his 2000s studio comedy heyday, there would have been something commercially grabby about a film that offered up two Vince Vaughns for the price of one. In that period, it would have been a wide theatrical release and probably a considerable draw in the wake of hits such as Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up. But cut to 2026, and the exhaustingly titled action comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a far shakier prospect, a drastically less marketable actor in a weakened genre that’s now almost exclusively streaming only.
It doesn’t help that it also lands after a year packed with other actors doing double duty – Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, Dylan O’Brien in Twinless, Robert De Niro in Alto Knights, Elle Fanning in Predator: Badlands, Theo James in The Monkey and an Oscar-winning Michael B Jordan in Sinners – and what might have felt like a unique selling proposition now feels like yet more of the same. The film, which recently premiered at SXSW and is now landing swiftly on Hulu/Disney+, is the very definition of more of the same, a flavourless soup of limp quips and needle drops that resembles any other star-led action comedy that one has already double-screened on a streamer in recent times.
The genre has become the standard straight-to-smartphone go-to as it theoretically provides something for everyone – action, laughs, recognisable faces, usually romance – but what was supposed to go down easily has started to become increasingly hard to swallow. Even with realistically low expectations, there’s been a dearth of genuine unforced fun to be had, the joins too visible to miss and the lack of effort too frustrating to ignore. Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s attempt might add a sci-fi element to the mix, but it’s otherwise indistinguishable from the rest.
That extra ingredient is time travel, explaining how gangster Nick (Vaughn) has doubled up, using a contraption created by the ex (Ben Schwartz) of his wife Alice (Eiza Gonzalez), who is having an affair with his criminal colleague Mike (James Marsden). Nick has travelled back six months to the night when Mike is murdered after he’s framed for being a rat, and Nick must try to work with himself to keep Mike alive.
It’s all pretty much as expected from then on, a checklist robotically checked off from yet another action sequence soundtracked to an unlikely 80s pop song (Sheena Easton following on from Ready or Not 2’s Bonnie Tyler) to an all-characters-on-deck singalong (Don’t Look Back in Anger featuring both Vaughns) to, most tiresomely, quickfire banter about subjects one wouldn’t typically expect from characters with guns at their side (sugar-free candy, erectile dysfunction and the bladder of a cat etc). Quentin Tarantino has influenced so many film-makers in so many ways, most of which are for the worse with time, but it’s most commonly seen in this specific type of back-and-forth which he mastered more than three decades ago in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But even back then, he realised that the simple act of such unexpected discussion taking place was not amusing enough in itself, something that the many, many, many writers in his wake have failed to grasp. Grabinski relies on it heavily here, but bar one amusingly straight-faced and detailed analysis of Gilmore Girls, it’s all too glib and underdeveloped to have an effect.
It’s a sci-fi action comedy that leads with comedy, but the crucial problem with Grabinski’s jokes is that despite being insistently nonstop, they are almost entirely unfunny (“Let me tell you something Dumbass Tony, you’re a fucking dumbass!” was one of many groan-worthy lines). Even when he does lean harder into the action, it’s also assembled without any real style or personality, with a weird deployment of some clumsy frame-speed trickery and a truly exhausting, and often deeply embarrassing, use of obvious songs (shootouts set to both Block Rockin’ Beats and The Boys are Back in Town). It’s all incredibly dated but never in a fun, throwback kind of way, transporting us back to a 2000s multiplex. It’s too awkwardly effortful in its attempts to be effortlessly cool, and even though Vaughn, Marsden and Gonzalez are well-equipped for the job, there’s nothing they can do to distract us from what Grabinski just can’t. A film like this really shouldn’t be so hard to enjoy.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is out on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere on 27 March
