Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice wants to show you a good time… machine

Courtesy Walt Disney Studios

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is on Hulu and Disney+ starting Friday, March 27. 

I got roped into a conversation recently about the irritating discourse around movies needing to have meaning—i.e., a moral center—and needing to be upfront about what that moral center is. As a critic, this is a fraught topic. I’ve always believed the best movies (or at least the most memorable) express what their creators are thinking about and, by extension, what we as a culture are thinking about.

That does not, however, make them moral fables. Cinema is art, obviously. It’s also entertainment.

Anyway, it got me thinking: not every movie needs to be moral or political. But every movie does have a perspective, whether dictated by a filmmaker or a control freak studio executive.

In a cultural climate where not much makes sense anymore, it’s valuable not just to have movies that reckon with how we got where we are and how we live with it now, but ones that give us a break by reminding us what movies can do. That is to say, pretty much anything you want them to, serious or otherwise.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is, like all of writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s work to date, a movie about play. It’s about having a good time. It’s also about all the tools movies can employ to help you have the best time possible. Grabinski is inviting you to a party where it helps to bring your movie nerd A-game (starting with the title, a play on both Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky and the 1969 Paul Mazursky sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) but it isn’t necessary in order to get things rockin’.

We meet our main trio at a welcome home party for Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), the son of mob boss Sosa (Keith David) who’s fresh off a six-year jail sentence. Nick (Vince Vaughn), an enforcer for Sosa, and his wife Alice (Eiza González) are among the partygoers. Also there: Mike (James Marsden), Sosa’s trigger man, Nick’s best bud and the man who is secretly having an affair with Alice.

Mike and Alice have plans to meet up later at a hotel, but they’re interrupted by the arrival of Nick…but not the Nick that Mike and Alice know. This Nick (also Vaughn) is from the future, and has come six months back in time to warn Mike that he’s being framed as a rat—by present-day Nick, no less—and is about to be dispatched by a hired cannibal assassin named The Barron. But it doesn’t have to end this way. Together, they can avoid Mike’s demise.

Courtesy Walt Disney Studios

The ways Grabinski deploys his particular brand of quippy, reference-heavy high-concept silliness encompass almost every trick a film has to give you a good jolt. It’s there in the writing—punchy, fast, frequently absurd. It’s there in the performances, from David relishing every bombastic threat and goofy proclamation to Arturo Castro earnestly warning a very concerned Tatro that he may have bypassed his sexual peak while in the slammer.

The approach, in every instance, seems to be “How can we make this scene funnier?” and more often than not, Grabinski gets us there. It could be argued that the one area the film doesn’t mine enough for jokes is visually, but given this is only Grabinski’s second outing as a writer-director, he deserves a little slack.

Is there a moral here? Anything of political substance? Of course not, that’d ruin the vibe. But there is a perspective in all this pursuit of the bit, genre-blending and trope-exploiting, and it’s this: joy. You, moviegoer, deserve delight, and we’ve spent so long with movies that insist we play by arbitrarily set rules that we forget there’s room to play.

A time machine in a gangster movie? If you can make it work, why not? Strippers dancing to Dave Matthews Band’s “Ants Marching”? Absolutely. Anything is possible if you let it be.

And we don’t let it happen nearly as often as we should.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is on Hulu and Disney+ starting Friday, March 27.