At the tail-end of the 1960s—the decade of Free Love and friction with the American status quo—Paul Mazursky’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” became an instant landmark comedy, sincerely skewering the uncertainties of self-discovery in an age of intimate experimentation. BenDavid Grabinski’s “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” by contrast, is a quippy hitman comedy with a dash of sci-fi gobbledygook sprinkled in for good measure; trade in Elliott Gould and Natalie Wood for Vince Vaughn and Vince Vaughn, and the similarities between this film and its obvious namesake become about as clear as the commonalities between an ice cream sundae and a touch of bird flu.
Not to suggest any sort of 1:1 analogy here. Grabinski’s gratingly self-impressed piece of straight-to-streaming fare may harbour a few pretensions about being more than another title to be scrolled past in the revolving door of viewing queues—looks like Hulu is the hosting party this time around—but by and large, the biggest crime “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” commits is simply the delusion of ambition. There are, after all, far worse fates that can befall a person than trying a bit too hard and slipping over a few wet rags along the way.
Like, for instance, being told that you’re going to die at the end of the night, which is exactly what Mike (James Marsden, starring opposite a superimposed duplicate of his costar rather than a superimposed CGI costar for once) faces one fateful night. A hitman known colloquially as Quick Draw, Mike’s affair with his cohort Nick’s (Vaughn) wife Alice (Eiza González) is upended when Nick informs his colleague that his hours are numbered. How does he know this? Because he’s from the future… obviously.
Six months in the future, to be precise, which has given the impulsive Nick plenty of time to ruminate over the loss of his pal despite the romantic betrayal that causes a rift in their friendship. Travelling back in time to warn and prepare Mike for a planned assassination by their organization’s head, Sosa (Keith David)—itself a result of false accusations of snitching and nobody seeming to be on the same page with anybody else about anything—future Nick comes to his friend’s aid by first taking care of one little snafu: his past self.
The plot, as you can tell, is already inane enough without considering all the adjoining cuts between the preparatory misadventures of Mike, Alice, and Nick², and the celebratory mishaps of Sosa and his son Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro) upon the latter’s release from a six-year prison stint. That stint itself was due to the rat Sosa wants to smoke out (and is convinced to be Mike), and the series of progressive parties—the party, the after party, the after-after party and, as always, the after-after-after party—act as a sort of time-check to remind us how long the titular crew has before all hell rains down upon them.
It’s convoluted enough before we even start accounting for all the flashbacks to sync up both the time-travel elements and the shifting motivations caused by new revelations and regrets, but Tim Squyres enjoys the break he gets from waiting for Ang Lee to pick up the damn camera again to sew these disparate pieces into some sort of coherently edited piece of action comedy. That “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” manages to be legible at all is a small miracle in itself, primarily because Grabinski’s aim reaches much further than his follow-through.
The pairing of Vaughn and Marsden feels about as electric as the pairing of Vaughn and his own half-asleep self—for an actor who’s spent so much of his career honing aggressively self-propelled comedic droning, he sure has precious little to say when the recipient of his would-be rapid-fire monologuing is himself—while González mostly appears thankful to have escaped the Guy Ritchie limbo and entered a film that at least appears to actually exist. (This film, to its credit, is lit with a moody competence by Zack Snyder regular Larry Fong that exceeds the average Prime Video conveyor belt release—we’re setting the bar high, today.)
But aside from Marsden’s every other reaction to a new revelation being “Fuck off!”, most of Grabinski’s riffing humour seems to be based around twee Tarantino-isms. At least four overworked jokes can be boiled down to a character not understanding a simple concept—a hitman who’s never heard of chloroform, a grown man who doesn’t know what “comeuppance” means, or a senior who’s never heard of Winnie the Pooh. David and Tatro, at least, make the most of their coked-out parallel screen time. But the sincere stupidity of their interplay with the likes of Dumbass Tony and Roid Rage Ryan (real fake names in this movie, by the way) falls somewhat short of the film’s attempted grasp at genuine friendship and the penetrating power of lament in a business that calls for total dispassion.
Between the close-quarters aspirations towards a high-concept Shane Black riff and the Wong Kar-wai-adjacent step-printing effects that pepper the film’s action scenes, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” certainly has a vague sketch of what a cool, breezy escapade is supposed to look like. But Grabinski’s attempt to find the pulse of that story is too frantic to be steadied by the mere presence of noticeable outside influences, and by film’s end, that time machine may just find itself calling out for the do-over that the film containing it is too self-consciously voguish to admit to needing.
