No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 5: The one that's in theaters

 

 

Title: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What Year?: 2022

Classification: Mashup/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

If there’s one thing I’ve freely allowed in the course of my movie reviews, it’s that I don’t work well with stuff that is new. Part of this is because I already chose to focus on certain times for most of my features. Another, very major part is that I concern myself with judgments that only emerge with time. The kinds of movies I usually deal with may be justly celebrated, unfairly reviled or completely forgotten, but they have to have been around long enough for audiences in general to reach a verdict and move on. This time around, however, I’m doing something very different, a movie I just took the time to investigate that’s already picking up a following and reputation, and that alone is unusual enough that I couldn’t cover it anywhere but here. I present Everything Everywhere All At Once, and to call it weird is like calling Zardoz 1970s.

Our story begins with an Asian-American woman named Evelyn who is juggling a failing laundromat with her elderly father, LGBT daughter and bland husband. Things go further south with an IRS audit and talk of a divorce. In the midst of it, she is contacted by a version of her husband from another universe, who warns that she has become a target of a being of cosmic chaos called Jobu Tupaki. With the aid of the inter-universal resistance, she fights and escapes a succession of assassins, along with the regular police. She soon learns that the chaos queen is out to destroy the entire multiverse with a force of destruction incarnated as a bagel with everything. But there’s a third faction in the midst, ready to kill even the innocent to save the multiverse, and it turns out the champions of destruction and order are her daughter and her father!

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a 2022 film written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The production was reportedly conceived in 2010, originally as a possible vehicle for Jackie Chan before the main character was rewritten as a woman. The film stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn and Ke Hhuy Quan as her husband, with James Hong (see The Golden Child) as the patriarch Gong Gong and Jamie Lee Curtis as the auditor/ assassin Deirdre. Scheinert self-identified as having ADHD based on research for the film. Filming was reportedly completed in 2020. It has been in limited theatrical release by A24 since March 2022, following a premiere at South By Southwest. It has earned over $47 million against a $25M budget, and received very favorable reviews from critics. A release on digital platforms and disc is planned beginning on May 17, 2022.

For my experiences, this is one I fittingly went into basically at random. Most of my contemporary movie viewing is at a shopping center very close to my residence, where I also do many of my regular errands (like buying up direct-to-Walmart toys). A few days before this review, I planned an expedition for a few things I needed to do anyway, and so I checked the listings to see if anything remotely interesting was showing and came up with this one. The real story came after, as I considered a range of material including a very wonky genre film that had been in the running for a slot here. I finally, somewhat reluctantly decided that this was by far the one most worthy of attention. I then made the more difficult decision to review it here, if only because it’s the only one of my features with enough randomness to accommodate it.

Moving forward, there’s really only one thing that even gives a frame of reference for this movie, and that’s a live-action Rick And Morty episode. It’s a comparison the filmmakers themselves seem to have acknowledged, and while I take no issue with their claim of independent origin, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the final form was more directly influenced by that show. This is an assumed world built on sight gags, pop-culture references and inside jokes first, with narrative, character development and any amount of logic following well behind. It’s an approach that quickly demonstrates both its strengths and its limitations, as the story careens well into the middle act on momentum and pure bonkers. If anything, things get even more random in the finale, particularly when Evelyn starts encountering more alternate versions of herself and her family. In the process, there are some quite crude gags, though what we actually see is surprisingly restrained (a common denominator with Rick And Morty). The obvious difference, and in a sense the biggest problem, is that the show only needs to do this for 20-some minutes at a time, where the present film runs for over 2 hours.

If this already seems like damning with faint praise, the question still remains, does this get to any kind of point? Certainly, the story and themes get more serious as the movie progresses, enough to balance the escalating weirdness. There’s also certainly character development and growing emotional involvement that is actually advanced by the multiple versions of each character. It’s especially intriguing and entertaining to see Hong’s transformation from nearly vegetative to a completely ruthless leader who has a point, perhaps reflecting what his character was all along. The flip side is that some very interesting and insightful angles simply get left behind, conspicuously the suggestion that the protagonist-Evelyn is really the worst version of herself. Again, hit or miss is the rule, which would be easier to go along with in a shorter film. There’s payoff enough in the final showdown between Evelyn, Gong Gong and her daughter, which brings pathos to the insanity. The one thing I find unsatisfying is that it still leads to a routine and reassuring “happy ending”, which has really been a non-trivial issue with Rick and Morty also.

That leaves the “one scene”, and this is the part that nearly made me drop this one. Usually, I give these things one extra viewing before I write them up, even if I no longer have the full movie, but of course, the options are far more limited for a movie still in theaters. As it happened, I at least quickly decided what I wanted to do. (Absolutely any of Curtis’s scenes can be considered honorable mention…) In the midst of the world-hopping, we come to a universe where Evelyn and her daughter are rocks, looking out on the Grand Canyon. The daughter explains that this is a world where life never evolved, with her lines delivered entirely in subtitles. They promptly go into a heartfelt, somewhat profane dialogue, still in subtitles, with the wind as the only sound. It’s a surreal moment in an already odd movie that I definitely couldn’t explain in more detail than I have without another viewing. At the same time, the literal still-life is a beautiful and evocative moment, and altogether welcome break from everything before and after.

In closing, I come back to the question of why I am doing this review here. This is where the lack of distance comes directly into play. It’s obviously not bad, let alone “worst”, but it’s way too soon to put it on a “best” list either (something I took into account specifically on considering my one other option, putting this in my still fledgling “really good” movie feature). I also have to say I feel a need to take this one down just a little, compared to the praise already being piled on. In the current and foreseeable history of Asian and Asian-American cinema, this belongs closer to the status of House and Super Inframan than The Seven Samurai, which should be just fine. (Ironically, it’s the second of those films that I still know only by reputation.) In the context of this feature, I would put it in the same class as Frozen (oh dear Logos, not the Disney movie) or Cross Of Iron, films that found the audience and appreciation they deserved while remaining very solidly in the cult/ “offbeat” category. With that, I am calling it quits, and for once, I’m happier for the experience.