Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) *

 

Directed by:  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Starring:  Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan

Okay, the truth:  I lost such patience with Everything Everywhere All at Once that I walked out of the theater about seventy minutes in.   I've only walked out on two other movies in my life: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and The Other Guys (2009).   I revisited The Other Guys in the last few years and found it to be an unfunny movie, but I guess my tolerance for such a movie was low that day.   Maybe that was the case with this one as well.   The movie, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels), is so all over the map and deliberately confusing that I bailed on it.   I just wasn't in the mood to process the mind-numbing silliness that was going on.  

The opening scenes are promising and made me wish the movie moved forward in that direction.   A harried laundromat operator named Evelyn (Yeoh) is under intense pressure.   Besides running the laundromat, her milquetoast husband Waymond (Quan) is trying to serve her with divorce papers, her ornery father (Hong) is forever complaining about something, and the IRS is auditing her business.  Evelyn is doing her best to organize her piles of receipts, but the agent handling her case (Curtis) isn't sympathetic.   She is looking to charge Evelyn with tax fraud when another version of Waymond appears to her.   This one is dynamic, proactive, and able to whoop people's asses with his fanny pack.  He tells Evelyn he is a different version of himself who comes from another universe.   There are numerous universes, each containing an alternate version of each person.   All of the decisions you make in life opens up different opportunities in different universes.   

Then, the movie flies off the rails quickly.   It all becomes so impossible to keep track of that Waymond has to stop every few minutes to explain what's going to Evelyn (and us).   Evelyn and Waymond's daughter Joy (Hsu) is the linchpin which holds the universes together.   She is seemingly the villain who is drying to destroy the whole multiverse, but by this point I had long stopped caring.   Joy explains how the multiverses throw everything together like an everything bagel.   I have a feeling if I stuck around longer, I would've endured about twenty or thirty more such explanations which do little to enlighten or entertain us.

The idea of a multiverse is becoming tiresome.   It was fun to an extent in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: No Way Home, mostly because the writers were telling a story about a mere two or three universes.   Everything Everywhere... jumps around at a bewildering pace between the various universes and the Alphaverse, which controls all of the other universes.   The frantic, breakneck pace leaps between nothing special and nothing at all.   I've rarely seen such energy expended for such a confusing premise, although to be fair I didn't stick around for the payoff.   Whatever the payoff is, I'm sure it wasn't worth sitting through the buildup.   

UPDATE:  I eventually watched the rest of the film at a later date.  In a calmer and open state of mind, I found I would not change a word of my original review.  The payoff was not anything spectacular.  My thought was:  "All that for that."