This twisty sci-fi comedy echoes the filmmakers of 80’s era who loved to tie out-there concepts to tried-and-true genre constructs. At its core, BenDavid Grabinski’s film is an action/comedy that just happens to include time travel, kinda like how “Back to the Future” never loses sight of the truths of being a coming-of-age comedy.

“Mike & Nick” opens at the coming-home party of a low-level Marky Mark-esque gangster named Jimmy Boy (a pitch-perfect Jimmy Tatro). He’s the son of a crime lord named Sosa (Keith David, having an illegal amount of fun), who vows vengeance on the rat who put his boy away for eight years. It turns out that the rat has been uncovered and will be executed that night in a job run by one of Sosa’s best capos, Nick (Vince Vaughn). Nick’s wife Alice (Eiza Gonzalez) is having an affair with an underling named Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden) and Nick has framed him to take the fall for Jimmy Boy’s incarceration. Sosa has called in a legendary assassin known as The Baron, who happens to be a cannibal, too. It’s the narrative foundation of a traditional love triangle thriller, one in which a mobster frames his wife’s lover for a crime he didn’t commit.

Of course, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” isn’t a traditional love triangle thriller. You can sense it’s not gonna colour in the lines when it opens with a mad scientist named Symon (Ben Schwartz) singing along to every word of Billy Joel’s “Why Should I Worry?” from the animated film “Oliver & Company,” one of several truly inspired musical choices in a film filled with them. It’s only one place in which Grabinski and his team push back against the “sanding down” of streaming originals and almost every blockbuster comedy, a trend that feels like an active pursuit to remove any reference that might go over the head of some viewers.

Without spoiling too much, the plan to frame Mike goes awry when he’s saved by the same man who set him up in the first place. It turns out that “Future Nick” (also Vaughn, of course) used Symon’s machine to come back six months and stop himself from making the worst mistake of his life. The minute that the present-day Nick saw his plan end Mike’s life, he knew he had done the wrong thing, framing a friend for falling in love with a woman Nick had been ignoring anyway.

Without overdoing the theme, Vaughn and Grabinski do a wonderful job playing Nick’s regret. “Future Nick” carries himself differently, speaking more softly and conveying the weight of crushing shame, the hope so many people carry that they could go back and fix what they’ve broken. It’s a truly great dual performance from Vaughn, his best film work in years. While Marsden remains one of the more underrated comic performers, this is Vaughn’s movie.

It helps that he’s surrounded by an excellent, unpredictable comic cast, largely made up of people playing total idiots. Grabinski surrounds Sosa with yes men defined by their most notable characteristic with names like Roid Rage Ryan (Lewis Tan) and Dumbass Tony (Arturo Castro). Everyone here understands how to thread that needle of being broadly goofy while also keeping the film from turning into a parody. It’s a comedy that’s consistently displays its eccentric personality but rarely feels like it’s desperately pushing a punchline for a laugh.

One of the reasons it never slides into parody is that Grabinski proves himself to be a pretty solid action director, too. From the first fight between Nick & Mike through to a remarkably staged action climax, “Mike & Nick & Nick Alice” features better stunts and fight choreography than so many action and horror films.