The new Hulu movie Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice has been marketed as a genre-mashing wild ride, with plenty of South by Southwest festival reactions and even genuine full reviews delighting in its supposed mixture of sci-fi, action, romance and buddy comedy. That’s a hell of a lot of genres. While watching it, I found myself wondering if the number of elements in play is supposed to distract from how its comedy has three deadening and similar modes. One involves characters being unexpectedly familiar with seemingly incongruous elements of pop culture: it opens with a scientist tinkering with his time-travel machine while singing along to Why Should I Worry?, a niche Billy Joel song from the old Disney cartoon Oliver & Company; later, there’s a long conversation about a bunch of criminal types’ deep familiarity with the TV show Gilmore Girls.
If that doesn’t sound funny enough, writer-director BenDavid Grabinski finds the flip side equally hilarious: people not knowing things. Gags include a guy who hasn’t heard of Winnie the Pooh, a guy who doesn’t know the proper name of chloroform, and a guy who doesn’t know what the word “comeuppance” means. These are all different guys. The third, even less sophisticated strain of comedy in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, are characters who fuckin’ swear. Talk about fuckin’ comedy! Sometimes their names even swear: one guy is nicknamed, get this, Dumbass Tony! In every detail of the movie, you can feel the heavy hand of the screenwriter, straining for irreverence, desperate to show that he’s made something that’s not like the other, regular screenplays out there.
The thing is, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a lot like a bunch of other screenplays out there this spring. March’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come again pits scream queen Samara Weaving against a bunch of rich people hoping to sacrifice her to the devil, in an archly yet lazily written explosion of profanities and ironic music cues. (It’s the kind of movie that all but looks around expectantly for bellylaughs when a character uses a PA system to tell people to “get the fuck out” rather than more polite evacuation-friendly language.) A week after that movie’s debut came They Will Kill You, which features a highly similar premise (young woman must fight through a series of Satan-worshipping, wealthy and powerful attackers in a limited location to save both herself and her younger sister) and similarly quasi-irreverent potty mouthed humor – though this one at least has the good sense to let a number of scenes play out without much dialogue before it scrapes bottom with witticisms such as “who the fuck are you?” and sentences with “bitch” added to the end.
There’s even arguably a gentler version of screenwriter comedy smarm on display in the feel-good mega-hit Project Hail Mary, where genius scientist Ryan Gosling communicates with an alien life form primarily through the medium of quippy adorability. Their banter is family-friendlier and more endearing, but the point is similar: to show off the filmmakers’ convention-flouting cleverness. Call it Ain’t It Cool News-core, after the once-powerful geek-news website that almost certainly would have championed these movies in an earlier era for representing outside-the-box thinking that happens to flatter the geek audience’s sensibilities. It’s not exactly 90s-style ironic detachment, not least because these movies tend to expect their audiences to genuinely feel something for their lead characters. It’s more like half-ironic attachment.
Blame for this newly reawakened strain of semi-irony can be assigned to a number of different filmmakers, traced through recent film history in a variety of directions. For years, the chief perpetrator for the ubiquity of warmed-over blockbuster quippi-ness was disgraced former Avengers impresario Joss Whedon and his many anonymous imitators in the Marvel stable, thought to be perpetually and frantically engaging in studio-mandated punch-ups. But this current iteration of comic relief is more intentionally tangential and harder to rush-rewrite at executive request. For better or (mostly) worse, it seems to be done out of love, not obligation.
It also tends to be R-rated, bringing to mind 90s auteurs such as Kevin Smith or especially Quentin Tarantino, who became known for punctuating bloodshed with minutiae-laden dialogue, or vice versa. But while these new movies do often juxtapose violence with inane chit-chat, the writers don’t tend to push buttons with the same daredevil energy as vintage Tarantino – and besides, that director’s movies haven’t really sounded much like Pulp Fiction in ages. Later-period Tarantino movies have plenty of dialogue scenes, but they’re less focused on pop culture and testy debates, often in service of unusually loquacious suspense pieces.
Screenwriter Shane Black is probably an undercounted influence on screenwriters who love to mix action and comedy, and his style may well be what some of these writers have in mind. But when combined with edgy gore and wacky shoot-outs, it’s hard to ignore the work of the Deadpool movies, where Ryan Reynolds plays a referential, regenerating superhero who makes endless jokes in the midst of bloody, over-the-top action sequences. Deadpool is evoked with particular clarity during They Will Kill You, for example, because star Zazie Beetz was in Deadpool 2, and its villains can be mutilated without dying, like the Reynolds character.
These new movies don’t bust down the fourth wall with direct-address asides, the way Deadpool does. In a way, that limitation makes them feel even phonier, because they’re trying to sell screenwriter-ly interjections as genuine behavior, rather than a conceit driven by a specific rule-breaking character. For all of the potential tedium of Deadpool’s snark, he’s communicating a clear sensibility. Those movies translate the antic, in-joke-y energy of a certain type of comic book designed to make goony 13-year-old boys, both literal and at heart, laugh knowingly.
No, the real damage wrought by the decade-ago success of Deadpool is more insidious than its wisecracks. It’s the way it turned an R-rated superhero movie into a de facto outlet for the lack of actual big-studio comedies. Audiences still obviously like to laugh, but turning action, horror and sci-fi movies into smarmy sorta-comedies allows movies to tap into that feel-good energy without bothering to cultivate or support genuine comic talent. Similarly, having a bunch of geeked-out filmmakers whose real strength is choreographing action (They Will Kill You’s Kirill Sokolov), fast-paced horror (Ready or Not’s Radio Silence collective), or, uh, get back to me (Grabinski) attempt to write comedy explains why these movies aren’t actually very funny. That’s also why Project Hail Mary’s humor skates by; at least directors Philip Lord and Christopher Miller have actual comedic experience going back to the animated Clone High and the live-action sitcom The Last Man on Earth.
Still, the effect of Project Hail Mary’s success might well be similar to Deadpool: convincing filmmakers that the place for comedy is embedded as a value-add to mega-budget spectacle, leading to more of the prefab irreverence you might find in a screenwriting course. Obviously there will always be a place for comic relief in movies like this, especially those employing an actor such as Ryan Gosling, who has revitalized his career as a bumbling comic lead. Plenty of action comedies and horror comedies work, too. But I’m not sure movies such as Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice or Ready or Not 2 actually qualify as those genre hybrids. They’re more like attitudes in search of a joke or cleverness in search of a subject. Or, barring that, screenwriters in search of a development deal.
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