Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice Review

There’s something entertaining enough about a double Vince Vaughn vehicle (try saying that three times fast). In Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, the veteran romcom actor and 2000s movie staple doubles up to play two versions of himself in a crime-caper buddy-comedy spliced with a time travel conceit. Vaughn is both Present-Day Nick and Future Nick, but only from six months in the future, travelling back to the present to warn his best friend Mike about his impending murder at the hands of mob boss Sosa.

Is there something in the water these days with actors playing the same character twice in one film? Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, Theo James in The Monkey, Dylan O’Brien in Twinless and Oscar-winning Michael B. Jordan in Sinners. Generally, though, these are twin characters, and a time travel variant isn’t something we’ve seen lately. This should give the film a genuine edge, a juxtaposition of two genres that you can reasonably expect a lot from. Strange, then, that the entire time travel element is practically ignored once established, glossed over in favour of rather lengthy dialogue scenes and needlessly laboured fights. Beyond some brief initial shock, none of the characters seems particularly fazed that this technology exists at all, let alone that it’s managed to dispatch a version of their friend from the future. There are simply two Nicks now, and the plot moves swiftly on.

Fortunately, the time machine isn’t the film’s only selling point, and there’s a fair bit to enjoy here regardless. It’s a little different to the usual crime caper format – think The Nice Guys with a sci-fi feel. Vaughn and James Marsden (Mike) have strong chemistry, and Alice (Eiza González) gets some smart lines, even if she’s a little underused as a character. The standout, however, is Jimmy Tatro, whose origins as a YouTuber are being steadily eclipsed by increasingly prominent movie appearances (you might recognise him from the cold open of Scream 7 if not from earlier cameos like 21 Jump Street). Playing the mob boss’s son as a full-throttle idiot nepo baby, he delivers moments of pure gold. Sure, it’d be better if there were more of these moments in general – the film doesn’t offer him as much screentime as it does five separate fight sequences, all of which play out to different classic pop tunes like Sheena Easton’s Morning Train and Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town. This works the first time, but once you’re on the third and Andrew W.K.’s She Is Beautiful is soundtracking some choreographed brawling, you’re left thinking Shaun of the Dead did it better with its epic zombie fight to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.

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The film has a keen interest in music and sing-alongs, opening with a scientist singing “Why Should I Worry?” from Oliver & Company whilst building his time machine. Similar instances occur throughout. Unfortunately, none of it quite coheres, since the songs have little relevance to the plot, and seem to have been arbitrarily selected at random rather than meaningfully chosen. In one crucial scene, the cast all sing “Don’t Look Back In Anger” to (spoiler alert) a wounded Nick in the back of a car, but it feels like a bizarre choice, plucked from nowhere rather than earned through any thematic significance. Also, given this scene is so important, it doesn’t ring true as it feels relatively stake-free – do we really care about Nick and Mike’s friendship enough for Nick’s potential demise to mean anything? Not exactly.

When the film leans into its humour, it’s at its strongest, and the film’s madcap streak gets room to breathe. There’s a genuinely funny scene where Future Nick is revealed to have watched the entirety of Gilmore Girls, and an extended discussion between the four leads about the relative merits of Lorelei and Rory’s respective boyfriends has the digressive energy of a Family Guy cutaway. The pop culture references do add a laugh – “I don’t like a rat except in that movie where he was cooking. Ratatouille,” – though they’re a little overplayed. Even the title will generate a laugh from film fans, since it’s a riff on Paul Mazursky’s 1969 comedy-drama Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a film, incidentally, about swinging. Evidently, the filmmakers are reaching for something in the territory of gangsters-who-know-their-pop-culture, and maybe there is something funny about gangsters talking about TV shows we recognise. Or cheeseburgers, if Pulp Fiction was anything to go by.

It’s formulaic in parts, but enjoyable enough, and its runtime is perfectly suited to this type of film at a lean 100 minutes. Ultimately, when the sitcom-style credits start to roll, you’re left feeling it’s more a bag of ideas that never quite melded together, but as a way to spend a couple of hours, it’s a perfectly passable one.

★★★

On Disney+ now / Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, Eiza González, Jimmy Tatro / Dir: BenDavid Grabinski / 20th Century Studios / 15