Hulu’s New Star-Studded Sci-Fi Crime Comedy Breaks A Decades-Old Time Travel Movie Tradition

A longtime tradition in time travel movies is broken in Hulu's Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.

The science-fiction action comedy film follows two gangsters, Nick (Vince Vaughn) and Mike (James Marsden), and the woman they love, Alice (Eiza González), as they attempt to stay alive during a wild night involving a time machine. As indicated by the title, the story involves Vaughn playing two different versions of Nick due to time travel. The movie premiered at SXSW and will come to Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on March 27.

In an interview with ScreenRant's Ash Crossan at SXSW for Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, director and writer BenDavid Grabinski was asked about the origins behind the movie's premise. He explained that he wanted to combine several different types of movies into one, including past and future versions of the same characters having to interact early on in the story. This led to the film's focus on time travel, but unlike other movies that explore this concept, he did not want any scientists involved, with Gonzalez adding that "he went for gangsters" and Vaughn clarifying that it is "science fiction, but no scientists." Check out Grabinski's comments below:

There were a bunch of types of movies that I wanted to make that were kind of disparate and disconnected. And then I had an epiphany one day that I wanted to make a buddy comedy action movie that had two buddies and then there was two of them. And I really liked the idea of like Scrooge at the end of the story having to interact with Scrooge at the top of the story. I really like the idea of someone who has a little bit more wisdom and life perspective, interacting with themselves before that and the kind of the comedy that would come from it.

And then it all just kind of snowballed into, well, then it has to be a time travel movie. I always wanted to do that. And I was wanting to make a time travel movie where no one involved was a scientist or knew how it worked because I don't want to have the scene where people are talking about how the machine works or talking about how time travel works. It makes sense in the movie, but I didn't want to make a movie about a bunch of scientists and that seemed like a fun way to time travel.

While Back to the Future's time travel is explained by Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and in Avengers: Endgame it's explained by Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), no such character understands how it works or fully breaks it down in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. Scientists are an understandably integral piece of most time travel movies, but they do not have a place in Grabinski's film, where the characters must navigate the situation without knowing the intricacies of all the rules.

The lack of scientists and their explanations is significant, but it is not the first time travel movie to use this science-fiction plot device alongside gangsters fighting to survive in the criminal underworld. Rian Johnson's Looper, which was released in 2012, features Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the older and younger version of a time-traveling assassin working for a crime syndicate. Looper is a dramatic science-fiction action thriller, though, while Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a science-fiction buddy action comedy, which finds humor in the two different versions of Mike interacting with one another.

Along with the eponymous characters played by Vaughn, Marsden, and González, the star-studded Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice cast features Keith David, Jimmy Tatro, Ben Schwartz, Stephen Root, Lewis Tan, Arturo Castro, and Emily Hampshire.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice comes to Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on March 27.