‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’ Joins The Ranks Of Low-Tech Time Travel Films
by Frank Martin
Time travel is an interesting subject for film and television. Initially, it would appear as if time travel is a high-tech sci-fi concept. It involves crazy physics and wild engineering in order to perform what many would call a miracle that defies time and space. It’s not far-fetched to consider that time travel borders on fantasy.
In fact, many fantasy stories do involve time travel with magic. So when science fiction uses time travel, audiences expect sleek, brilliant machines to pull off the feat. However, there’s an entire genre of low-tech stories that utilize time travel in bizarre and relatively simple ways. Nick & Mike & Mike & Alice is one of them.
The story begins as Jimmy (Jimmy Tatro), the son of a gangster named Sosa (Keith David) is released from prison. Sosa knows that one of his own men betrayed him and vows to get revenge. It’s revealed later that Nick (Vince Vaughn), a hitman working for Sosa, framed a colleague named Mike (James Marsden) because he was having an affair with Alice (Eiza Gonzalez), Nick’s wife. After Mike is killed in the future, Nick realizes he made a mistake and travels back in time in order to correct it.
The time travel aspect of the film takes a very small portion of the plot. The reason Nick even knows how to time travel is because he financed the work of one of Alice’s friends, who is an eccentric scientist that was working on a time machine. Not much time is spent on the science. Instead, the scientist works by himself and develops a time machine using nothing more than a chamber.
Nick activates it by walking in the chamber and then walking out. This very simplistic and rudimentary system of time travel is reminiscent of low-tech sci-fi films like 12 Monkeys and Primer. Even Back To The Future has a simplistic view of time travel using the DeLorean. The film fits neatly into this genre and separates itself from more high-tech movies that utilize time travel.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is now streaming on Hulu.
