A woman takes a job as a housekeeper in a NYC high-rise, unaware of the building’s history of disappearances. She soon realizes the community is shrouded in mystery.
Chuck says:
There’s a good idea rattling around in BenDavid Grabinski’s “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.” Before enduring this surprisingly dull exercise, I didn’t realize I needed a time travel-hitman-buddy-movie-dramedy. Ironically, after sitting through this slog of a movie, that need remains.
Even after my plot summary you may need to chart it out with pen and paper but I’ll do my best. Here we go: Nick and Mike (Vince Vaughn and James Marsden) are hitmen for crime kingpin Sosa (Keith David). Mike is sleeping with Nick’s wife, Alice (Eiza Gonzalez). Mike is aware of this and has been dispatched to get rid of Nick because Sosa thinks he ratted out his son, Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), who’s just been released from prison.
The twist is, that there are two Nick’s, one from the future and one in the “present.” Seems that Symon (Ben Schwartz), an inventor they lent money to for a secret project, has invented a time machine. Nick stumbles upon this, six months in the future, when he goes to collect on the loan. Ruing his actions on the night he was to kill his partner, he goes back in time to engineer a different outcome. Upon doing so, he not only has to stop his other self from carrying out the hit but must deal with Sosa and his minions, who eventually decide to take matters into their own hands.
The premise is quite clever and ripe with parodic possibilities as well as meta commentary. Inexplicably, Grabinski lets these opportunities die on the vine, too often opting for sequences of uninspired gun play or needless narrative tangents. His use of flashbacks, though vital to fleshing out the characters’ pasts, hobble the pacing of the story. Just when we start to get a handle on the twisty-turny nature of the plot and the film begins to build a head of steam, these segues stop it in its tracks. Compounding this is a superfluous scene with Stephen Root as a ruthless enforcer which, despite the character actor’s presence, stops the film dead in its tracks.
Were it not for the veteran cast, “Mike” would have been insufferable. Vaughn’s trademark gentle condescension is put to good use here as future Nick explains the time travel shenanigans. Give the actor credit for handling numerous exposition dumps with a degree of style and wit, while providing subtle and effective differences in his dual role. Gonzalez has always been more than just another pretty face, and I’ve been waiting for her to get a role where she really shines. She displays a comedic flair here that needs to be exploited in a vehicle of that sort immediately. Marsden remains the reliable “almost leading man,” a reassuring presence, effortlessly exuding charm and sharp timing. He shines in the action scenes, proving he needs an action film to star in.
Frankly, I loved these three together and was wishing they were in a better movie. Having directed only a short, a television episode and one feature, Grabinski simply doesn’t have the chops to pull this off. The material requires a more tongue-in-cheek tone, while the characters should be delivering their dialogue at a rat-a-tat Howard Hawks-like gait. As it is, there’s surprising lack of energy in the interactions between the principals.
Like so many of his clueless contemporaries, Grabinski thinks louder is better and that if he can execute numerous action sequences that makes him a filmmaker. That may be enough for some, but it certainly doesn’t make him a storyteller. “Mike” is another example of what happens when you focus on bombast rather than intimacy.
2 Stars
