The winningly overloaded martial arts mash-up presents the famous star as a suffocated lady who discovers her full kick-ass ability in a series of parallel lifetimes.
Everything Everywhere At Once (in cinemas today) is a fantasy story about self-discovery encased in a high-flying, cross-cutting, fascinatingly creative action spectacle from A24. Michelle Yeoh, an actress who can do anything, stars in the film. She does all we know she can do and then some. Yeoh offers us the emotional gravitas of a woman tied down by her untapped potential as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese American immigrant caught (she feels) in an unfulfilling marriage and battling to keep her family’s small laundromat afloat.
Yeoh gives us a masterful action movie star, a poised and proper film icon, an operatic diva, a put-upon teppanyaki chef, a vulnerable queer woman with hot dog fingers… as Evelyn’s other, substitute selves — concurrent variants of the same woman, all of them shaped by the varying choices they’ve made throughout their lives… Some of the roles are similar to those that Yeoh has previously done. Others could have come straight from Yeoh’s own life.
To bring so many facets of one character’s personality to life, it takes magic or, in this case, a multiverse — and a multiverse is exactly what Everything Everywhere has in mind, with its dizzying blend of styles and a Bible’s worth of genre-flipping celluloid shout-outs and cultural references. You don’t need a multiverse for an international film star as skilled and versatile as Yeoh, who thankfully has the credentials and professional endurance to match her talent: Her filmography is already impressive.
Hong Kong girls-with-guns feature: you get here early. Yes, Madam (1986), the genre’s pinnacle, with the Brosnan-era Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1998); a turn-of-the-century wuxia pastiche (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) alongside tense period dramas (The Lady and Memoirs of a Geisha) and contemporary, romantic pop confections (Crazy Rich Asians). She’s worked on Star Trek, and Marvel, and is now a part of the Jackie Chan Cinematic Universe. Perhaps all that was needed until this last film was a one-volume omnibus, a two-hour career retrospective.
And that’s part of the fun and the humour, but it’s only part of it. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the joint project filmmaking duo known publicly as the Daniels, wrote and directed Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it bears the mark of their previous work, as pop-attuned and insistently imaginative as their music videos, with more than its capitalization of teen-boyish humourous hijinks. (See also Daniel Radcliffe’s flatulent corpse in the pair’s directorial debut, Swiss Army Man, from 2016.) It’s not perfect; some of its elements get irritating after a while, and its world-conquering passionate optimism becomes limpid sentimentality. Indiscretion, on the other hand, is not the same as ambivalence. I was more struck by the authenticity built into the film’s concept from the beginning than by the visceral contours of the plot — but all this means is that the film has succeeded at the difficult part.
It all starts with tax issues. Evelyn continues to run a laundromat with her hubby, Waymond (the great Ke Huy Quan), under the watchful eye of her father, Gong Gong (played by another legend, James Hong), and without much help from the couple’s disgruntled daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who dates women and is wary of her family’s hesitant acceptance of the fact. The IRS is on the family’s tail, and the laundromat is one tiny misstep away from being seized, as symbolized by a severely browed Jamie Lee Curtis. This is nothing compared to the fact that an Alphaverse supervillain named Jobu Tupaki is wreaking havoc someplace in the multiverse where Everyone Everywhere plays out. She must be brought to justice! Who else except Michelle Yeoh could take on such a task?
It takes another Waymond, one who isn’t aware of Evelyn’s reality, to educate her on who she truly is and what she is capable of. This is a segment of the film’s most poignant and instructive thread. Yes, the multiverse’s fate is at stake, but it’s just as important that this kaleidoscope of worlds is inhabited by Evelyns who are Evelyns with the advantage of other, more empowered choices. The movie tells us that every fork in the road of life leads to different versions of ourselves. The Evelyn we know, whose broken-down laundromat is about to be co-opted by a Jamie Lee Curtis with a stockpile of butt plugs in her cubicle (don’t ask), has shied away — been pushed away — from personal and professional decisions that may have led her to a fuller version of herself. Meanwhile, those fuller versions are out there, living their reality as the aforementioned divas, all played by Yeoh, and blessed with abilities that Evelyn lacks but could have had — grace, poise, and a badass attitude, to name a few. And which Yeoh clearly possesses, as she portrays each of these Evelyns in an increasingly inventive array of alternating sequences.
As a result, Evelyn — the one closer to our own reality — must learn to literally draw on these versions of herself. One of Everything Everywhere’s more ingenious twists is its approach to skill acquisition, which is a film like A Matrix was as simple as a sequence of programs uploaded into Keanu Reeves’ skull. Daniels has fashioned this film into something like a role-playing game, with talents that must be won. Evelyn must master the art of leveling up. Which necessitates stepping outside of herself to the most absurd aspects of her own conduct, using her wits, letting go of shame and hesitancy, and plunging headfirst into the filmmakers’ jumble of nonsense. It also means Yeoh and her co-stars will have to manage the wide range of looks Daniels has prepared for them. Wong Kar-gritty-glamorous Wai’s romance, for example, is full of the director’s visual signatures, such as ecstatically speed-ramped pictures and vividly textured lighting. A training montage straight out of a kung fu movie. 
A raccoon is featured in this Ratatouille riff. It’s comically postmodern to the point of being almost retro, which also describes Everything Everywhere’s a sense of action, with its enriched sense of comedy colliding with violence, practical materials (like fanny packs) joining the ranks of physically superhuman choreography — a mix many of us rightfully associate with Jackie Chan.
The pastiche is enjoyable because of the references. A handful even manages to stand out by referencing the performers’ own careers and histories, such as Yeoh’s work with Chan or, even more subtly, Quan’s work with Wong Kar-Wai (whose romantic drama 2046 Wang assistant-directed). It’s as riffy as it is wacky, and it’s not always invigorating; some jokes or referential gestures feel a little more dragged out than others. The sexual humor is maybe the least rewarding, not because it’s obscene, but because the gross-out approach feels a little one-note (as fun as it is to see someone cannonball onto a butt plug). But the stars manage to make it mostly feel worthwhile — not least in the case of Quan, who had previously walked away from the film industry due to a lack of interesting roles (and proves especially good as a hunky hero in this one), and Wang, a youthful star who evidently relishes the chance to play good and bad, sexy-vicious and troubled, all in the same film. (On this front, the only thing missing is greater diversity from James Hong, an actor whose list of film credits is a superheroic feat in itself.)
Multiverse films frequently take too much time describing themselves. From the what to the how to the approaching dramatic ramifications of it all, there might be a lot to chew on. However, it isn’t until the final act that Everything Everywhere begins to sag under the weight of its concept, which feels a little too much like a collection of unprecedented emotional resolutions: a series of conversations that are all harmonically intercut to the point of distorting their otherwise simple and direct melodrama. It’s a season finale’s worth of content crammed into one long stretch of the film, and the material may not be up to the filmmaking’s grandiose approach. Everyone basically hugs it out. At the same time, there are real selves and parallel selves. The movie’s endgame isn’t nearly up to par. The game, on the other hand, is on to something.
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