BenDavid Grabinski always wanted to make an action movie. In 2026, he finally got his chance.
“It’s the thing that I want to do the most,” Grabinski tells Polygon. “I love Hong Kong action movies. I love John Woo movies. I love Ronny Yu. I love Jackie Chan.”
The co-creator of Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off puts his spin on the time-travel genre in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, which tells the story of a mob enforcer named Nick (Vince Vaughn) who travels back in time to save his partner-in-crime Mike (James Marsden). Hijinks ensue as a foursome made up of Mike, future Nick, present Nick, and Nick’s wife Alice (Eiza González) try to stop a murder and change the timeline.
While the movie is more comedy than action, thanks to Vaughn’s knack for rapid-fire zingers, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice culminates with an epic gunfight as our heroes take the fight directly to their former crime boss Sosa (Keith David) and his army of goons. The result is a bloody shootout spread across two floors of a sprawling mansion.
For both Grabinski and Marsden, it was a dream come true.
“I loved all the action stuff I got to do in this,” Marsden tells Polygon. “It’s not something I’ve really done much of in previous projects.”
Grabinski always knew he wanted a big finale, but getting there wasn’t easy. It took a ton of planning and preparation to pull off.
“I’m a big believer in prep,” he says.
To start, Grabinski hired a team of stunt actors and coordinators to choreograph the scene. Then he built an accurate, full-sized replica of the set using cardboard walls for rehearsals, and created a 3D model as well. The set itself, a functional two-story house, was also built on a soundstage to give the director full control.
Next, he gave his fight team some ideas and let them cook.
“We’d watch movie scenes together,” Grabinski says. “I’d basically pitch them what I wanted. Then they would go and be creative and shoot a version with stunt guys, edit it together, and send it back to me.”
Once the fight choreography was set, Marsden got to work rehearsing.
“I went to some place out south of Santa Monica to get with these fight choreographers and learn all of these sequences,” he says. “I just was like, I want to get to set. I want to know exactly what I’m doing.”
“James spent, I don’t know, a billion hours learning his choreography,” Grabinski jokes.
The director used a few tricks to guide the audience through the scene, which cuts between multiple parts of the house as Mike, Nick, and Nick all fight for their lives. In an earlier scene, we follow one mafia member as he walks through the house during a raging party while the “Blood Rave” music from Blade plays in the background.
“That’s to set up the geography of the finale,” Grabinski says. “When you’re cross-cutting between three people, if I haven’t already established that, you’re going to be like, Well, where is this in relation to each other? Is this room here? So I tried to create what I thought was a fun thing that was really actually just educating the viewer on where that stuff was going to take place.”
He also avoided relying on close-up shots, or lots of cuts during the fight scenes. “I like shooting action in wide, and not just a bunch of handheld closeups where you can kind of hide what’s happening,” Grabinski says. Those wider shots also helped reinforce the layout of the house throughout the scene. “You always need to know that Future Nick’s in this room, which is across from this room, and we know that hallway was there because we had those scenes with a guy at the door.”
While there were plenty of limitations to this method — Grabinski describes one shot he had to abandon because it was impossible to film without removing the roof of the house — he found the experience of directing a John Wick-style action scene rewarding.
“It’s like the perfect fusion of being a kid with a bunch of toys and having fun, and then just dumb math bullshit of just figuring out how to do all those things,” Grabinski says.
“I woke up every morning most excited to go to work when I knew I had to do the action stuff,” Marsden adds. “It’s a technical marvel that BenDavid accomplished it.”
Grabinski doesn’t take it quite that far. He admits he’s still got a lot to learn if he ever wants to come close to the great action filmmakers, but he’s happy to have been given the chance.
“I’ve wanted to make an action movie my whole life,” he says. “The fact that I can do stuff that’s even remotely — I’m not saying it’s as good as John Woo at all, but I’m saying that it’s in that ballpark of the heroic bloodshed stuff — was really satisfying.”
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is streaming now on Hulu.
