I’ve been a film critic for almost 16 years, and in that span of time, I’ve seen all different kinds of movies. However, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that has left me simulatenously spellbound and baffled as Everything Everywhere All at Once. That’s unquestionably the most conventional thing I can say about it.
To call it audacious would be selling it short. To call it enigmatic would be selling it short. To call it unique and perplexing would be, well, you know. I could give anybody a test on this movie after they’ve seen it and they’d flunk every question and you know what? In this case, that’s to the movie’s strengths.
I’ve only seen it once, so I can’t say that I have it figured out, but I will take this test and hope to pass. But first, let me catch my breath.
The movie stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, who owns a laundromat business along with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan from The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). They’re being audited by the IRS after failing to file their taxes correctly.
Once they arrive to sort the mess out with their auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis), Waymond’s consciousness is taken over by another entity known as Alpha Waymond and he tells Eveyln that there’s a multiverse which is created by choices humans make. Sadly, no multiple versions of Spider-Man show up.
The people who exist in this multiverse have learned something called “verse-jumping” which allows people to take the skills and memories of their other counterparts in these multiverses. Here’s where everything (no pun intended) goes loony.
Evelyn learns that the existence of the multiverse is being threatened by the presence of a woman named Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu). Tupaki has learned the ability to experience all universes at once.
Writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinhert give us a series of bizarrely hilarious images including one universe where people have hot dogs for fingers, a raccoon that learns how to cook and even a sequence where two rocks have an existential conversation about the nature of reality and humanity. How does this figure into the plot? I don’t know and I don’t care.
About halfway through, I gave up attempting to make sense of any logical connections and allowed this movie to be an assault on my senses, but it was a welcome assault.
In an age where just about every movie flaunted on screen leaves us starving for imagination and originality, Everything Everywhere All at Once provides us with a three-course dinner and dessert.
The movie provides a genuine blast of kinetic energy with some outrageous and thrilling martial arts scenes and then blows our minds with some philosophical ideas that are sprinkled with irreverent humor. This has more laughs in it than any comedy I’ve seen in recent memory.
Now, I’ll ask that if you plan on seeing this movie and fail the test of understanding it, good. If you passed, you’ve disappointed me.
Grade: A
(Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language.)
