Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

👌🏻 3.3 / 5 👌🏻 — It throws as much at the screen as it does names in the title… more fun than it deserves to be, but way more movie than it needs to be _Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice_ is the kind of film that shows up on a streaming platform with a weird title and a cast that makes you do a double-take. Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, Eiza Gonzalez… and Vince Vaughn… for a streaming comedy? I’m in. And for stretches of it, I was. Here’s the problem though: this movie cannot decide what it wants to be. We’re talking buddy comedy, goofball dialogue, romantic comedy, time travel sci-fi, crime thriller, AND action flick all crammed into one runtime. That’s not a genre blend. That’s a genre pile-up. And I genuinely couldn’t figure out when it was even set. 70s clothes, 70s decor… but smartphones. Plus that jittery old-school slow-mo they apparently called step-printing, a technique straight out of 90s kung-fu movies that gets used way too many times and never once felt necessary. The vibe was all over the place. The banter is mostly entertaining, I’ll give it that. But there is so much of it. At some point, the dialogue stops being fun and starts annoyingly chewing up the runtime. Vince Vaughn does his thing, classic Vaughn energy, totally watchable. But James Marsden genuinely surprised me. He shows up ripped and actually pulled off the action hero thing. Like, convincingly. And listen… I’ll suspend a lot of disbelief for a movie. But asking me to believe someone was tired of and cheating on Eiza Gonzalez? That’s where the fiction lost me. It’s a swing at something fresh and weird, and I respect the attempt. It just never fully lands. But I mostly had a good time, and sometimes that’s enough.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​