Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 31, 2026
Listen, up front: Don’t listen to anything I write about a Vince Vaughn movie. Don’t ask me to explain it, but I have a tremendous weakness for the man. I may not care for his politics, but I absolutely cannot resist a Vince Vaughn performance. Do you know how bad a Vince Vaughn movie has to be before I’ll turn on him? The Internship bad? Nope, liked that one. The Watch? Watchable whenever he’s on screen. We’re talking Fred Claus or Couples Retreat bad before I’ll write off a VV performance.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is definitely not Couples Retreat bad. It’s not even The Internship bad. It might not be bad at all — again, don’t trust me on this. I enjoyed the damn thing, in part because there’s not one but two Vince Vaughn characters. If it had had a hole, I’d be a pig in mud. But two Vaughns and one James Marsden? Goddamn irresistible.
Vince Vaughn plays Nick, who arrives from six months in the future via a time machine that Symon (the criminally underused Ben Schwartz) funded with mob money. Present Nick is the mob. He learns that his partner, Mike (Marsden), has been sleeping with his wife, Alice (Eiza González), and is also the rat who put Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro) — son of mob boss Sosa (Keith David) — in prison. Sosa hires a cannibal assassin called the Barren (Dolph Lundgren) to kill Mike on the day Jimmy Boy gets out.
Future Nick knows how this night ends the first time around: the Barren successfully killed — and ate — Mike, and he’s here to stop it. Because Future Nick regretted it. They were friends. Also, Nick was a lousy husband to Alice, and apparently two time streams of guilt is the threshold for intervention.
That’s the setup. There are plenty of shootouts, but at its core, this is a comedy — and a pretty decent one. Writer/director BenDavid Grabinski has a solid feel for action-comedy pacing, but what really makes it work is Vince Vaughn and James Marsden and an inexplicable but wholly committed quantity of Gilmore Girls references. Vaughn aside, it’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s better than most of the streaming slop that comes down the pike. An hour and forty minutes that doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time — which, honestly, is more than we can ask of most of this stuff.
‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’ is currently streaming on Hulu.
