Everything Everywhere All at Once

It’s no miracle, but it fortunately is an interesting film. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a properly wild ride, where for a long time you have no idea what the they actually want to say, but the gradual unravelling and discovery is damn interesting. Partly, thanks to the awesome action scenes, the clever script, the strong emotional moments and the lots of ideas, but mostly because of the approach of both directors, who push it all into the audience almost to the point of violence. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film where you have no idea what you're going to see in fifteen minutes, alternating extremely fast paced scenes with slower ones, unafraid to go for the jugular, turning from a wild action sci-fi into an intimate drama about the most ordinary things, and then into a rip-roaring comedy. It's just too much. Two hours and twenty minutes is a subjectively untenable runtime for a film that, while it works on a dramatic level, still runs in a pretty rut despite the original visuals. And on the other hand, the moments where Kwan and Scheinert pour one wild idea after another from their sleeves start to get tiresome after a few minutes. Everything Everywhere All at Once is really interesting, but it needs someone to tell the directors where to add and subtract. Sometimes it's a bit of a drag, despite the imagination, creativity, great actors, action and emotion. (07/07/2022)

That's how you put together a rock, a Ratatouille, and the long arm of the tax authority, and you get something between Don’t Look Back, Rick and Morty and Big Trouble in Little China. By all logic, it should be a disparate hodgepodge of half-baked ideas, allusions to anything, originality at all costs, and stupidity². All this in charge of someone who happened to have a solid budget and an impressive ensemble, but no producer to hold the reins. And that's what it is. However unlikely it may be (or maybe we are happy that it worked in spite of everything), it is, worlds wonder, a cohesive and tightly grasped whole, which is undeserving of only a slightly overblown runtime. Thanks to confident direction, and the aforementioned perfect cast, it handily manages to throw up one bizarre scene after another, as well as wringing out emotions in a brilliantly effective "family members finding their way to themselves and each other" equation throughout. (07/22/2022)

Unfortunately for me, this highly anticipated film, which I was looking forward to as a potential movie of the year, crossed the line between quirky oddity full of playful ideas and disorganized mess where nothing matters, and not only once. While it always sort of gets back on the track and I was able to follow and enjoy it, I'm used to putting more focused films on a five-star pedestal, films where I can see the filmmakers have things firmly in their hands, and I simply didn't get that impression with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and not only because the finale completely missed me emotionally. The plot gradually gets into such a whirlwind, such a geyser of unlimited imagination, that it's really hard to find any fixed point – not necessarily "logical". Oh, and some of the jokes are trying so hard that it felt embarrassing a few times. I appreciate playfulness and originality, but I would have slowed down a gear or two. (05/19/2022)

A woman is trying to pay her taxes… An unexpectedly playful take on parallel universes. Unfortunately it’s unnecessarily long and at times unnecessarily self-indulgent in its weirdness at the expense of a fairly standard story. Swiss Army Man held together much better and it was also more fun. Here they should have trimmed in places and add a little in others to create a coherent ride across what could have been. Kwan and Scheinert put so much into it that I felt terribly overwhelmed by the lines. Michelle Yeoh is fantastic in all her versions and enjoys every one of them. Ke Huy Quan seized the opportunity to play a role tailor-made for Jackie Chan and got the most out of it. I need a few more viewings to take it all in, but for the first time, so far, excellent entertainment that lacks something short of perfection. It’s like a doughnut without the dusting. (01/29/2023)

What happens when you mix some of Marvel's stinking failed comic book movies with a bit of The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, an attempt at a revolutionary depiction of a story about family values (not) fulfilling their potential and totally WTF (read modern) pop culture moments? An absolutely frenetic travesty, where nobody knows what will happen in five minutes, but at the same time nobody really cares. (03/09/2023)