"Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice" 4K Review

There aren't as many Hulu Original movies as Netflix churns out - the last one I reviewed was the disappointing Samara Weaving caper flick Eenie Meanie - so it's noteworthy when one comes along and this week's arrival is the odd scifi-crime-dramedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice which sounds like a confusing bisexual swingers movie.

Vince Vaughn stars as Nick, a mobster attending the party celebrating the release of the son of boss Sosa (Keith David), Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), after six years in prison. Sosa announces to the attendees that he has learned who the snitch that sent Jimmy Boy to prison is and that retribution is coming. A woman, Alice (Eiza González), has a chilly conversation with Nick and leaves the party.

Waiting at a swanky hotel room for her is Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), a trigger man for Sosa's mob who has had enough of the murdering life and plans on leaving the organization. Nick calls Mike to do a job for him and while Mike tries to dodge the gig, ends up riding with Nick to a house where he's given chloroform and the order to knock on the door and use the chloroform to knock out the man who answers the door. Mike does so and to his surprise, the man of the house is Nick! Whaaaaaaaa????

After a massive brawl due to expired chloroform, this second Nick escapes in the first Nick's car. Nick and Mike eventually catch up to Nick at a gas station and capture him. They then call Alice to warn her to get out of the hotel room because a cannibal hitman called The Barron (a blink and miss it stunt casting choice I shant spoil) is coming looking for Mike.

We finally find out what the heck is going on: The Nick who takes Mike to the house is from six months in the future and the Nick at the party and the house is Present Nick who has framed Mike for being the rat who sent Jimmy Boy up the river as payback for his sleeping with Alice. Future Nick had stumbled over the time machine when trying to collect on the load Sosa made to finance its construction and when he came back in time to the current day, he accidentally killed its builder, Symon (Ben Schwartz), and destroyed the machine.

Since we're working on Looper time travel rules (where anything that happens to Present Nick will impact Future Nick as tested by Alice stabbing Present Nick) and the machine and creator are destroyed, there is only one chance at getting this right. Future Nick is remorseful for setting up Mike, but knows Present Nick will still try to kill him and the fact no one knows what The Barron looks like complicates matters.

As confusing as I'm sure the last to paragraphs probably sound, it's not as complicated to follow as I make it sound because some plot spoilers I'm omitting are included and it makes sense. The stakes are clear and the scenarios suitably ridiculous leading to some quality action scenes.

Where writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (who created & co-wrote the Netflix Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime series which brought back the entire Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie cast for a somewhat divisive story) bobbles the ball is in having the best parts being extraneous conversations about non-plot things. Present Nick gets into a heated debate with a gas station clerk over sugar-free candies; there's a running gag about Jimmy Boy having impotence issues; Sosa explains to Jimmy why he's not black; and everyone seems to be a Gilmore Girls fan with almost as much time spent discussing that as Bullet Train wasted nattering on about Thomas the Tank Engine. And the weird choices in musical needle drops becomes it's own thing from the very beginning as we have to watch Symon sing along with a song from the 1988 animated dog movie Oliver & Company.

While the script wanders at times, Vaughn is surprisingly rooted in the dual role, frankly doing a better job of playing the same man at two points in his life than Michael B. Jordan did playing twins in Sinners, earning a Best Actor Oscar. While he does his trademarked Vince Vaughn schtick, he also portrays how the night's events change and changed Nick to drive Future Nick's actions. 

Despite the messy script, there's enough entertainment in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice to merit the watch. While allegedly in 4K HDR, the nighttime setting and generally dim lighting moots the benefits of the format. It seems that only Apple TV bothers to exploit the range of HDR, so don't feel bad if you don't have an awesome TV watching this.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"Send Help" Review

In the past two decades, Michigan's own Sam Raimi, who started with low budget cult classics like Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Darkman has made a trio of bloated muddled sequels - the franchise-killing Spider-Man 3, the Temu Tim Burtonesque Oz the Great & Powerful, and the messy Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - far removed from his scrappy roots. However, his latest, Send Help, is thematically and spiritually akin to his 2009's horror effort Drag Me To Hell and the move downscale suits him.

Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, an awkward, dorky corporate strategist who is reminiscent of Brendan Fraser's Elliot in Bedazzled - a sad tryhard who has no friends and annoys her co-workers. But she's a brilliant worker and was going to be promoted to a vice president slot at her firm except the CEO and founder of the firm has died, his clueless frat boy son, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), has assumed control of the firm and given the job to one of his frat brothers.

After Linda storms his office protesting the snub, Bradley explains that her off-putting manner and appearance is why he passed her over, but offers her a chance to prove herself by coming along on the corporate plane to Bangkok to help finalize a merger. During the flight, the jerk who got her veep gig shows an audition video she'd submitted to Survivor to be a contestant. We'd seen survivalist books in her apartment, but the video is pretty cringey stuff. The laughter of the boys club is cut off by the plane crashing in a storm after half of them are sucked out of a breach in the cabin.

Linda washes ashore onto an island along with Bradley, who is unconscious with a badly injured leg. Good thing she knows survival skills as she rapidly builds shelter, and sets about gathering food and fresh water from rainfall and waterfalls. She even hunts a boar in a hilariously bloody scene. (This IS a Sam Raimi movie, after all. Evil Dead 2 fans will dig it.)

Not appreciating her efforts is Bradley who is belittling of Liddle (heh), mocking her survival skills which have kept him alive. So she leaves him alone for a couple of days until he's very hungry and thirsty to the point he's apologizing. But is he becoming a better, less sexist pig, or is he just trying to stay alive? And how does Linda's sudden alpha dog status spark changes in her, especially when early on she spots a possible rescue boat but instead hides because it's "too soon" to head back?

Since there's really only about one-and-a-half possible outcomes to this scenario (she lives or they both survive), Send Help rests on the performances and execution of the premise. O'Brien has the short-end of the stick in that the script by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, Baywatch) paints him as barely a two-dimensional cartoon out of a 1980s women-struggling-in-the-workplace comedy like 9 to 5 or Working Girl. It's just hard to imagine such an unreformed male chauvinist pig could exist in 2025 with today's woke pressures on corporations.

On the other hand, McAdams really elevates the material by delivering a layered performance which starts off also cartoonishly broad but the deepens showing her rising to her survival challenges then having to wrestle with the boss problem. It's a long way from Mean Girls and The Notebook.

Raimi is in fine form as well, tossing in some nice throwback Grand Guignol gore and some camera moves longtime fans will enjoy. More cheap thrillers from you, sir. 

If you like your dramedy lean and especially mean, Send Help is a curdled Castaway.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Scream 7" Review

 It's weird to realize that fans of the original 1996 Scream could be grandparents with grandchildren almost old enough to watch these movies. While the series peaked with its subversive meta original outing with it's shocking twist opening scene and characters who knew the rules of horror movies, the sequels, while not as good - I scored the first four movies 7/10, 5/10, 6/10, and 7/10 (theatrical in 2011) or 6/10 (Blu-ray in 2021) - they were adequate entertainments.

Even the fifth-in-series 2022 "requel" (reboot+sequel) - confusingly titled Scream while it's follow-up was Scream VI (because we're doing Roman numerals now) - were both 6/10s, the strain of trying to connect the new stories to the old ones was beginning to get ridiculous as it straddled the generations. 

Series Final Girl Neve Campbell sat out the requels, but after the main stars of them - Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera - left the planned 7th film for reasons like supporting Jewish genocide (Barrera) and deciding not to work with Jewish genocide fans when they had a hit TV series (Ortega) and then the director slated to replace the requels directors also bolted, producers must've backed the money truck up to Campbell's home because she was back for Scream 7. (Oh, were doing Arabic numbers again.)

Adding to the mix was the return of Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of Scream 1, 2 & 4, not only co-writing but directing for the first time since 1999's critical and box office flop Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Sadly, he delivers the worst installment of the franchise he originated, but perversely it was the highest-grossing installment, raking in $194M, over four times its budget, and ensuring that Scream 8 is inevitable. Yay.

This time around the cold open scene is a young couple visiting the home of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) which was the setting for the original film's finale and memorialized in the in-universe Stab film series. It's been turned into an Airbnb with taped outlines and fake blood to recreate the scenes from the movie. The superfan man says there's a rumor Stu survived having a TV dropped on his head. (Foreshadowing!) Of course, another Ghostface is there, killing them (spoiler alert!) and setting the house ablaze. 

We then catch up to Sidney Prescott-Evans (Campbell), who is living in Pine Grove, IN, married to the town police chief, Mark (Joel McHale with a weird voice that makes him almost unrecognizable), and the mother of Rebellious Teenage Daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and two(?) younger children who are conveniently visiting Grandma unseen. Sidney runs a coffee shop and life is wonderful until she receives a Facetime call from Stu Macher, face scarred but still alive. He claims he's outside Tatum's school auditorium and going to kill her, but by the time Sidney and the cops arrive, Ghostface has killed two of Tatum's friends including bestie Hannah (Mckenna Grace).

At home, Mark's officers sweep the house but conveniently overlook the attic providing the perfect hiding place for Ghostface who emerges, takes Tatum hostage, stuff happens, he runs out of the house and is promptly run over by Sidney's frenemy Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and her assistants, twin siblings Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown), holdovers from the past two movies. Ghostface is unmasked and identified as a patient from a nearby mental asylum. They team up to find out if Stu is actually still alive. People die. People look like they've been killed, but somehow survive. And another murderer(s) with ridiculously strained connections to Sidney are revealed.

The Scream series has always been verging on self-parody almost immediately with the sequels, but have served as adequate movies for slasher fans despite, but Scream 7 is the first one to pretty much bore me from end to end. The tropes of setting up red herrings and having "Wait, who? What?" villain reveals are so formulaic that it's pointless to even bother trying to guess. May as well just stare at the blankness and wait for it to be over.

That Williamson would type up such a lackluster story for the series he created is baffling. It feels like novice attempting a Scream knock-off. When the scariest thing in the movie is Cox's heavily-Botoxed and fillered face (Campbell is aging naturally), you're failing at horroring. That such a lackluster entry became the most successful really speaks ill of the moviegoing public.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" Review

 People complain that movies are just sequels, remakes/reboots, and formulaic twaddle, but all too often when something truly unique makes it to theaters, they stay home, it fails, then they complain that Hollyweird only churns out endless rehashes of what makes money. (Gee, ya think?) The latest victim of audience abandonment is Gore Verbinski's (director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy) Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die which didn't even gross half its miniscule $20M budget.

Sam Rockwell stars as a nameless man from the future (let's call him Sam) or so he says when he walks into a Los Angeles Norms diner (think Denny's, non-LA readers) looking like a bearded homeless lunatic in a transparent raincoat over a bunch of mechanisms which may be a bomb. He claims he has traveled back in time 117 times trying to prevent the end of the world from a technological threat, only to fail the previous 116 attempts. He is trying to assemble the correct mix of diner customers for his mission and seems to know details about how useful (or mostly not) the diners are to the team.

Threatening to blow up the restaurant when when the cops arrive (as they always do), he gathers a group including Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who seems to have more useful knowledge from an unlikely source; school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who are frustrated by their students addiction to their phones and were attacked by them; a young woman, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology and gets nosebleeds from it; and a trio of people who I don't recognize, don't get flashbacks, and thus don't have plot armor. (Spoiler alert!)

As they set off on the quest, Sam explains that they need to get to a house where a nine-year-old prodigy is about to finish an AI that will make Skynet seem like a Speak & Spell unless they get to his computer and insert a flash drive Sam has to install safety protocols to limit the AI's power.

Along the way we get flashbacks for the familiar actors' characters backstories and eventually get Sam's story of how his mother had tried to protect him from the AI Apocalypse but his youthful curiosity had tragic results. The party also has to avoid phone zombies, weird mercenaries hunting them, and deal with a monster that I won't describe lest it spoil the bonkers moment it arrives.

The screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) has a lot of interesting ideas about our addiction to technology to the detriment of humanity. It's a world where kids doomscroll so quickly through social media slop that they're not even watching what is already abbreviated content. They're just tapping for the next dopamine hit after a second. It's a world where teachers are so blasé about school shootings that it's a nuisance more than a danger. And the way the aftermath of shootings is dealt with isn't far removed from actual proposals to keep deceased people active on social media. (Don't worry, the movie doesn't soapbox on the subject demanding mass disarmament.)

The ending is a tad anti-climatic as the revelation of what's behind all this and the results of the party's quest aren't as satisfying as it could've been, but that's also somewhat the point: Not everything should be perfectly tailored to satisfy your every desire.

Rockwell's performance is solid, balancing the notes he's got to hit, and Richardson reminded me of the snarky tart 1990s Janeane Garofalo before her daddy issues drove her mad and she just wanted to scream about Republicans. Peña and Beetz are hampered by thinner roles and when did Temple become old enough for mom roles?

While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die doesn't quite stick its landing it definitely provides a wild ride with some deep thoughts to go with the crazy, prompting more contemplation about our overly-wired and increasingly AI slopified world. It's ironic that a movie intended to warn against becoming hermits connected jacked into the Matrix failed because people prefer to stay home to consume content and it's on their TVs and phones they may finally see this.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"War Machine" 4K Review

 Time for this week's disposable Netflix Original movie, War Machine, starring Alan Ritchson (Amazon Prime's Reacher) as an Army Staff Sergeant whose brother (Jai Courtney) was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan where the unnamed soldier was the lone survivor. To honor his brother's desire that they try to become Rangers, he arrives at RASP (Ranger Assessment and Selection Program) two years later and is assigned the number 81 as his identity.

For 8 weeks, 81 and his fellow numbered candidates perform grueling training with members washed out weekly. Despite his veteran status, he refuses to bond with his fellow candidates or take the lead as pressured by his superior officers (Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales). When he makes it through to the final test phase, they want him to drop out to cope with his PTSD over his brother's death, but he refuses. Reluctantly, they allow him to do the Death March final test and put him in command.

The Death March mission is to locate and destroy a simulated shot down plane, rescue the pilot from a "prison camp", and get to the finish line at the base. The team of about a dozen soldiers is dropped off and while 81 fails to inspire them much, he is supported by 7 (Stephan James in what borders on a Magical Negro role). The first night the squad is startled by a fireball in the sky. The next day they locate what they believe to be the downed plane, but when they attempt to demolish it, it is unscathed. Then it begins to rise up, revealing itself to be an alien mech which scans the platoon then proceeds to blow the bejeebers out of them.

Half the numbers buy it and the rest are forced to run for their lives, sustaining grievous injuries which slow them down carrying the wounded through the mountainous terrain. 81 suffers flashbacks to his ill-fated attempt to save his brother and the survivors continue to doubt him. Unarmed (they only have blank-firing weapons) and pursued by a giant murder walker, who will survive? Duh.

Co-writer and director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3, The Hitman's Bodyguard) does a solid job staging the grisly action set pieces, but the characters are all stock tropes and the ending is not only not in doubt, but handled ridiculously in Temu Michael Bay fashion. (We're supposed to believe 81, carrying a wounded soldier on his back, heading for the all-important finish line, is surrounded by soldiers rushing around dealing with things but not one person intervenes to aid the wounded.) They also seem to be setting up a sequel because why not.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation has some good highlights during nighttime action scenes, but it's a far cry from the eye-searing visuals the format can deliver as in Apple TV's 2nd season of Hijack which recently concluded.

An adequate concept adequately executed is War Machine's box score and is another watch-once-and-forget-it that Netflix churns out.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.