Another run-of-the-mill streaming caper that fails to offer anything we haven’t seen done better many times before
B
ack in his 2000s studio comedy heyday, there would have been something commercially grabby about a film that offered up two Vince Vaughns for the price of one. In that period, it would have been a wide theatrical release and probably a considerable draw in the wake of hits such as Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up. But cut to 2026, and the exhaustingly titled action comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a far shakier prospect, a drastically less marketable actor in a weakened genre that’s now almost exclusively streaming only.
It doesn’t help that it also lands after a year packed with other actors doing double duty – Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, Dylan O’Brien in Twinless, Robert De Niro in Alto Knights, Elle Fanning in Predator: Badlands, Theo James in The Monkey and an Oscar-winning Michael B Jordan in Sinners – and what might have felt like a unique selling proposition now feels like yet more of the same. The film, which recently premiered at SXSW and is now landing swiftly on Hulu/Disney+, is the very definition of more of the same, a flavourless soup of limp quips and needle drops that resembles any other star-led action comedy that one has already double-screened on a streamer in recent times.
