March 30, 2026 · Watch the trailer
Cinephiles doomscrolling through streaming services in search of something new might quickly land on “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” the latest film to drop on Hulu, watch the trailer, and assume they’ve found a spiritual successor to the COVID-era cult favorite “Palm Springs.”
The through line is certainly there: a quirky time-travel comedy that modernizes and twists the narrative structure popularized by Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day, aiming to make it more broadly appealing to a contemporary audience.
But while “Palm Springs” arrived at a moment when theaters were shutting down, there’s far less justification for a Vince Vaughn–led comedy to bypass the theatrical model altogether. “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” instead feels quietly dumped onto Hulu just two weeks after its debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
Written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” is a science fiction comedy set within the world of anonymous, mid-tier gangsters, built on a premise that suggests far more than the film ultimately delivers. A retiring hitman, Mike, is pulled back in by his closest ally, Nick, as the two are forced to navigate a job complicated by the arrival of a time-traveling version of Nick himself.
It’s a concept that should invite inventive storytelling, yet the film struggles to articulate its own rules, leaving its plot increasingly convoluted and difficult to track. The rules of the film are, in theory, simple – just incredibly stupid. The film writes itself in and out of its time-travel premise so cleanly that, by the end of the first act, it becomes almost entirely irrelevant, reduced to a hollow gimmick that drags the narrative down to subpar comedic standards.
Playing two versions of Nick, Vaughn brings an irreverent energy that is noticeably restrained, attempting to layer emotional depth into a screenplay that never meaningfully supports it. While it remains visually clear which version of Nick occupies any given scene, simply assigning regret to the present-day iteration does little to establish the kind of character development or internal conflict necessary to sustain a compelling narrative.
James Marsden plays his usual dopey straight-man persona to a T as Mike, a man disillusioned by violence and desperate to get out. But it’s hard to ignore just how aware Marsden seems of the film’s limitations, delivering a performance that never attempts to push beyond familiar ground.
His chemistry opposite Vaughn is serviceable for a film like this, though there’s a noticeable absence of the kind of sharp buddy-comedy banter or repartee that audiences have come to expect from a Vaughn-led vehicle.
Eiza González, best known for “Baby Driver,” works as Alice largely because she plays the role straight – a woman caught in a complicated dynamic with both Mike and Nick. The confusion embedded in her performance mirrors how the character is written on the page, and somewhat ironically, it makes her the most effective of the three leads.
The film’s larger ensemble is bafflingly underwritten and bizarre, with Keith David cast as an African-American mob boss paired with a stereotypically white gangster son, and Dolph Lundgren appearing in a cameo that wastes nearly every second of his screen time. Most disappointing, however, is that the film’s strongest comedic presence, “Parks and Recreation” standout Ben Schwartz, is written out entirely, a casualty of the increasingly convoluted narrative maneuvering that Grabinski employs to escape the structural holes the film creates for itself.
Visually, there’s nothing obtrusive about the technical aspects of “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” that adds to or detracts from the viewing experience. It’s safely directed and shot in a way that feels standard for a typical studio comedy, and while the film’s climactic action sequence plays like a clear imitation of a “John Wick”-style shoot-’em-up, it stands as perhaps the most engaging moment in the entire film.
Thankfully, any moviegoer drawn in by Vaughn or the film’s outlandish premise won’t have to make the trip to a theater to see this largely underwhelming effort on a big screen, as “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” will likely fade into the background of Hulu’s interface within a matter of weeks.
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