{"id":527581,"date":"2026-03-16T21:57:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/527581\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T21:57:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:57:07","slug":"vince-vaughn-is-double-the-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/527581\/","title":{"rendered":"Vince Vaughn is Double the Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGiven his line of work as a hitman, Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden) should probably have a better idea of what chloroform is than he does. But in \u201cMike & Nick & Nick & Alice,\u201d when Nick (Vince Vaughn<\/a>) asks him before embarking on a job whether he\u2019s seen any of the many movies the sedative has been used in, it\u2019s a reminder that those type of thrillers haven\u2019t been in style in recent years. Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski<\/a> makes a strong case to change that in an exuberant time travel genre-bender where what\u2019s old often leads to fresh ideas. Vaughn plays both a present and future version of Nick, who is enlisting Quick Draw Mike to help him take down himself while there\u2019s still time to prevent one of the biggest mistakes in his life.<\/p>\n

\n\tPop culture references may elude Quick Draw Mike, but Grabinski packs them in for those in the middle of the Venn diagram of people who enjoy gunfights and the snappy banter of \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d (which cleverly comes to serve a major plot point in the film). That\u2019s a potentially narrow subset of the population, but \u201cMike & Nick & Nick & Alice\u201d boasts the devil-may-care swagger that proved so broadly appealing for \u201cDeadpool Vs. Wolverine.\u201d That may have been the best thing to come out of the Disney\/20th Century merger before an ebullient opening title sequence for this 20th production where Grabinski finds use for Billy Joel\u2019s \u201cOliver and Company\u201d hit \u201cWhy Should I Worry?\u201d to underscore the development of a time machine by a scientist name Symon (Ben Schwartz) who does more than whistle while he works. The music may stop when he dies in a hail of bullets, but the filmmaker ensures the beat never lets up as the action starts to center on Nick, who held the debt for Symon to build his machine in the first place. The inventor was a friend of his wife Alice (Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez) and found himself able to pick a moment from his past that he\u2019d want to revisit when he came around to collect.<\/p>\n

\n\tGrabinski is more interested in three-card monty than quantum mechanics as \u201cMike & Nick & Nick & Alice\u201d unfolds when Nick picks a crazy night where mounting misunderstandings were going to lead to Mike\u2019s death. Energy propels the film forward a bit more than the plot when the exact reasons why Nick feels compelled to spare Mike have to remain shrouded in mystery. All that\u2019s clear is that Sosa (Keith David), a criminal kingpin, comes to believe Mike is responsible for his son Jimmy Boy\u2019s (Jimmy Tatro) six-year prison stretch and he\u2019d like to have a gift ready for his release. The event involves no less than three after-parties, and the film bounces between Nick\u2019s future self and Mike trying to prevent Present Nick from serving him up on a silver platter to Sosa while Jimmy Boy is busy enjoying his newfound freedom to its debauched fullest.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, Future Nick is in fact a wiser Nick. When he comes clean about what\u2019s driving him, which is particularly surprising in light of the fact that Mike is having a affair with Alice, the film reveals an unexpected tender core when he sees stopping Present Nick from his impulsiveness is less about changing the course of history than saving himself and others some eventual and unnecessary heartache. Vaughn, who showed before a rare ability bring gravitas to a high-concept thrillers that might be hard to swallow otherwise when he did the body swap horror comedy \u201cFreaky,\u201d has a ball in the dual role. Marsden and Gonz\u00e1lez make their suave movie star turns look easy, looking comfortable wielding weapons of any sort from an arsenal that ranges from wicked smirks, and killer one-liners to plenty of guns.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are too many of the latter to count as the evening wears on, yielding a shootout at Sosa\u2019s estate that really comes alive due to all the elements at play, from Grabinski\u2019s impressive balancing of multiple story threads to Isabelle Guay\u2019s production design that mixes eras and colors. The reliably muscular cinematography of \u201cKong: Skull Island\u201d director of photography Larry Fong is also a highlight, though the occasional desire to mimic the step-printing stutter shot popularized by Wong Kar-wai is one of the film\u2019s slight missteps when it moves beyond a loving nod to an inconsistent part of the cinematic language. However, with its many references, \u201cMike & Nick & Nick & Alice\u201d takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Given his line of work as a hitman, Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden) should probably have a better…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[237335,88,206,92757],"class_list":["post-527581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-bendavid-grabinski","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-vince-vaughn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}