Kevin James as Nick Brannen in The Dilemma (2011)

In The Dilemma, Kevin James plays Nick Brannen, an engine designer whose best friend knows something about his marriage that Nick himself doesn’t. The film was directed by Ron Howard and released on January 14, 2011. Nick is the one person on screen who has no idea what is going on, and James builds the character around that blind spot.

Nick is a gifted engineer and the technical half of an auto-design partnership with Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn). Screen Daily described him as an anxious, workaholic buddy. Ronny catches Nick’s wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) with another man, and Nick’s trust in the people around him drives the story.

Where James was before Nick Brannen

By 2011 James was best known for playing an ordinary guy with a big heart. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) was his breakthrough, and Bomb Report called it his first solo outing as a star. Screen Daily noted that The Dilemma opened in the same mid-January slot that Paul Blart had used, and that James was on a commercial streak.

The studio could reasonably expect the team-up with Vaughn to repeat that success. The Dilemma was a co-production of Universal, Imagine Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment, with a reported $70 million budget.

What the part asked of him

Nick is not a clown. He is a loving husband and a nervous professional who is racing to finish a pitch that could make his company. James gets his laughs from Nick’s earnestness, while the film asks him to carry real hurt. Screen Daily summed up the lead pairing as Vaughn’s witty everyman against James’s vulnerable nice guy.

The Independent Critic’s review judged that James seemed the most at ease of the cast. It said he grounded the film with a more authentic, semi-heartfelt performance while Vaughn went more frenetic. Both leads, it added, were outshone by Ryder.

The film shifts between broad comedy, marital drama and a business-pitch plot. Critics often complained about those tonal shifts, according to Bomb Report. Metacritic’s aggregate score was a middling 46 from 32 reviews. James’s casting is one of the things reviewers singled out for praise.

How the film performed

The Dilemma took $17.8 million in its opening weekend, placing second behind The Green Hornet, Bomb Report recorded. Its domestic total was about $48.5 million, and its worldwide gross was about $69.7 million, which did not cover the budget. Bomb Report put the weak results down to mixed reviews and a campaign that never settled on whether the film was a broad comedy or a drama.

What changed afterward

The Dilemma did not slow James’s career down for long. It showed that he could play a rounded character with real emotional stakes, not just the lovable underdog of his family comedies. Over the following years he kept making comedies, and stand-up remained part of his work. He released a special, Irregardless, in 2024.

His most recent big release shows the same instincts as Nick Brannen. In Solo Mio, released by Angel Studios on February 6, 2026, he plays Matt Taylor, a man left at the altar in Rome, and he also co-wrote the script. Deadline called it a sweet Valentine’s rom-com, and ScreenRant reported that critics generally preferred it to his previous film, Playdate (2025), with praise for his leading-man charisma.

Taken together, Nick Brannen and Matt Taylor are two versions of the same figure: a decent man who is blindsided by someone he loves, played by an actor who makes the audience want to stand next to him. The Dilemma was not the success its makers hoped for, but it gave James one of his earliest chances to play that part with drama as well as comedy.

Header photo: Angela George / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0, modified: resized and blended with an AI-generated background. The person in the header is a real photo; only the background is AI-generated.