It’s not just the incredible Billy Joel and Steve Winwood needle drops that give BenDavid Grabinski’s remarkably fun “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” a bit of a nostalgic vibe from ‘80s pop culture. This twisty sci-fi comedy also echoes the filmmakers of that era who loved to tie out-there concepts to tried-and-true genre constructs. At its core, Grabinski’s film is an action/comedy that just happens to include time travel, kinda like how “Back to the Future” never loses sight of the truths of being a coming-of-age comedy. The filmmaker this project recalled the most for me is one of my favorites of that era: Joe Dante, a man who excelled at making truly difficult popcorn entertainment look easy. I didn’t expect to be reminded of “Innerspace” at SXSW in 2026, but I ain’t mad.
“Mike & Nick” opens at the coming-home party of a low-level Marky Mark-esque gangster named Jimmy Boy (a pitch-perfect Jimmy Tatro). He’s the son of a crime lord named Sosa (Keith David, having an illegal amount of fun), who vows vengeance on the rat who put his boy away for eight years. It turns out that the rat has been uncovered and will be executed that night in a job run by one of Sosa’s best capos, Nick (Vince Vaughn). Nick’s wife Alice (Eiza Gonzalez) is sleeping with an underling named Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden) and Nick has framed him to take the fall for Jimmy Boy’s incarceration. Sosa has called in a legendary assassin known as The Baron, who happens to be a cannibal, too. It’s the narrative foundation of a traditional love triangle thriller, one in which a mobster frames his wife’s lover for a crime he didn’t commit.
Of course, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” isn’t a traditional love triangle thriller. You can sense it’s not gonna color in the lines when it opens with a mad scientist named Symon (Ben Schwartz) singing along to every word of Billy Joel’s “Why Should I Worry?” from the animated film “Oliver & Company,” one of several truly inspired musical choices in a film filled with them. It’s only one place in which Grabinski and his team push back against the “sanding down” of streaming originals and almost every blockbuster comedy, a trend that feels like an active pursuit to remove any reference that might go over the head of some viewers. Will teenagers get the “Alf” joke in Grabinski’s script? Probably not. But it still rules.
Back to the plot for a second. Without spoiling too much, the plan to frame Mike goes awry when he’s saved by the same man who set him up in the first place. It turns out that “Future Nick” (also Vaughn, of course) used Symon’s machine to come back six months and stop himself from making the worst mistake of his life. The minute that the present-day Nick saw his plan end Mike’s life, he knew he had done the wrong thing, framing a friend for falling in love with a woman Nick had been ignoring anyway.
Without overdoing the theme, Vaughn and Grabinski do a wonderful job playing Nick’s regret. “Future Nick” carries himself differently, speaking more softly and conveying the weight of crushing shame, the hope so many people carry that they could go back and fix what they’ve broken. It’s a truly great dual performance from Vaughn, his best film work in years. While Marsden remains one of our more underrated comic performers, this is Vaughn’s movie.
It helps that he’s surrounded by an excellent, unpredictable comic cast, largely made up of people playing total idiots. Grabinski surrounds Sosa with yes men defined by their most notable characteristic with names like Roid Rage Ryan (Lewis Tan) and Dumbass Tony (Arturo Castro). Everyone here understands how to thread that needle of being broadly goofy while also keeping the film from turning into a parody. It’s a comedy that’s consistently displays its eccentric personality but rarely feels like it’s desperately pushing a punchline for a laugh.
One of the reasons it never slides into parody is that Grabinski proves himself to be a pretty solid action director, too. From the first fight between Nick & Mike through to a remarkably staged action climax that even John Woo would admire, “Mike & Nick & Nick Alice” features better stunts and fight choreography than several of the action and horror films that premiered at SXSW.
Much of the buzz around one of the better received films in Austin this year was about the tragedy of how it won’t be enjoyed in theaters, surrounded by laughing strangers. It’s a Hulu premiere, and the streaming service has a bad habit of burying even their best films, although quality has broken through the algorithm before with projects like “Prey.” The hope is that this throwback to a time when it feels like movies could be sillier, more playful, and just plain weirder hits that same audience, one that also longed for something that isn’t really making it to the multiplex anymore. Do I wish this wonderfully quirky movie could make millions at the box office? Sure. But that’s not where the industry is at today. So we have to do our part to get people to watch it at home. I bet Joe Dante will dig it.
This review was filed from the world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. It will be on Hulu on March 27th, 2026.