Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
…………………………………………………
Everything Everywhere All at Once Movie Review
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a 2022 action comedy film directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and starring Michelle Yeoh. It is a bad movie, pure and simple.
………………………………………………….
“Of all the places I could be,
I just want to be here with you“
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led. First and foremost, I am already sick and tired of multiverse stories in current movies. It is an overused trope and it seems like a fad. As for this movie, I’d had low expectations, but I should have lowered them even more as what I saw here was not just overrated, but simply terrible.
The basic idea behind the movie is a sound one. Making a more personal tale within the multiverse trope is a strong concept and some other better filmmaker could have done this story justice. But the Daniels do not appeal to me and this is even worse than their feature debut. Their brand of humor is overly broad, juvenile and ridiculous.
The emotional core of the film is the fraught mother-daughter relationship. I am also finding the overused trope of toxic Asian mothers having complicated relationships with their daughters. ‘Turning Red’ already did this story and that Pixar movie did it much better. This one has the added lesbian element, but even that addition could not save the movie as the writers diminished any meaningful, emotional engagement of the story with all that nonsense surrounding the main relationship.
The acting is excellent across the board. Seeing the likes of James Hong and Ke Huy Quan was great as the two got some of their best work in this movie, though I did find the husband overly goofy and silly as is this entire movie. Jamie Lee Curtis was actually funny at first and she was the most amusing part of the cast. As for Michelle Yeoh, she is so incredible here in a very versatile role that the movie did not deserve her immense talent. She saved it from being a total disaster for me.
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those movies that favor style over substance. The multiverse ideas here are so dumb, so utterly preposterous and so frustratingly ridiculous that as a big SF fan I found them to be laughable. The movie is weird for the sake of being weird, but even worse it is silly for the sake of being silly, and I find silly very off-putting myself.
You cannot categorize it as a particular genre as it tries to be this genre-bender of a movie, but it fails in every single area. Some of the humor worked, but most of it was just very juvenile and eyeroll-inducing (the hot dog hands, seriously??). The action was also ridiculous as it was framed within the comedy framework, thus none of it could be taken seriously. The SF/fantastical elements were atrocious and the dramatic arc did not work because of all this stupidity surrounding it.
Technically speaking, the movie is an accomplishment to a degree, but the filmmakers employed this extreme audio-visual overload that was more mind-numbing than appealing. The editing and the overall messy structure exemplify the kind of purposefully chaotic filmmaking that I just find pretentious and frustrating more than anything else. The directing is terrible and the pacing is just off.
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
Two and half hours was just too much as I wanted it to end after the first hour or so. And the biggest shame was that the emotional core deserved better storytelling and worthy directorial treatment, but these two guys just ruined every chance that this movie had to be good and/or deep. The result is one highly overrated movie that most people love for mostly very wrong reasons, which is a whole other discussion in and of itself. As for me, this film was horrible and there is nobody that could convince me otherwise.
