Written And Directed by Dan Kwan And Daniel Schienrt
Evelyn (to Joy): "Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you."
First of all, you don't have to be Marvel or DC to play around with the Multiverse and neither do you need a ridiculously high budget either as this smaller affair managed to prove in spades. Yes, with the Oscars nods this week, this review was overdue.
The premise for this ambitious adventure felt straightforward enough. You have a middle aged Chinese immigrant, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) barely getting through life, struggling to run a failing laundromat with her well meaning but meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) as well as dealing her disapproving father, Gong Gong (James Hong) and stubborn daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Basically, Evelyn's life is a bit of a car crash.
Not to mention the fact that Evelyn and Waymond are being audited by the IRS and the auditor in question, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) seems more determined to focus on Evelyn's many shortcomings than anything else. Then to really send Evelyn over the edge, an alternative version of her husband kept popping up as Evelyn soon came to grips with the idea of a Multiverse and that every bad decision she's ever made has had it's own consequences and spawned different realities.
Watching Evelyn comes to grips with the Multiverse concept as well as seeing some truly bonkers versions of reality made this film a lot of fun. For instance, the idea of Evelyn living in a world where everyone had hot dogs for fingers was by far one of the strangest ideas in this movie. Other versions had Evelyn living different types of lives and having a variety of skills that out Evelyn had to access at different points in order to deal with the main problem of the movie.
The main problem being Jobu Tupaki, who had been reveled to be a version that could access every version of Joy and throughout the movie, you had both mother and daughter both combating and ultimately having to understand one another. There's a nice subplot with Evelyn having difficulties accepting Joy's girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel) but the conflicts between Joy and Evelyn ran deeper than that and the ultimately resolution between the two was far more rewarding too.
All the fractured relationships that Evelyn has in this movie - Waymond, Gong Gong and Deirdre are beautifully explored, take several interesting turns and are all resolved just as effectively as the main dynamic with Joy. Even a brief rivalry that Evelyn had with a raccoon dependent chef named Chad (Harry Shum Jr) was given a beautiful conclusion.
There's so much in this movie worthy of gushing over and the best part that for a movie that might feel small in parts, it's bigger in others. It's gorgeously ambitious with some beautiful action sequences, costumes and FX but excelled with all the fantastic character moments. There isn't a single performance that lets the side down and every character was compelling in their own way. Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu deserve all the awards here.
- The movie was split into three parts, hence the title of the movie and we had Evelyn speaking English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Not to mention subtitles for the rock versions of Evelyn and Joy.
- I have to give a shout out to Jenny Slate's dog mother character but I do not approve of using a dog during a highly coordinated fight scenes.
- I'm pretty certain one sequence in this movie had clips of some of Michelle Yeoh's past movies when we dipped into her movie star reality.
- Chronology: Chinese New Year played a big part in this movie with the party at the laundromat.
Everything Everywhere All At Once had everything, including a potential reality destroying bagel and delivered one of the best movies from last year. I should've seen this one a lot sooner than I did but now that I have seen it, the hype for it was more than justified. An absolutely gripping, mind bending movie from start to finish with everything coming together wonderfully. I loved this one.
Rating: 9 out of 10
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