Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Yeoh takes the lead of this wacky martial arts sci-fi film of fate

Some of my friends in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Vancouver had seen Everything Everywhere All At Once and they either laughed so hard or cried a lot. I was warned that it would probably be taken down from theatres soon so I made an effort to see it this past Sunday.

Can I first say that there are way too many commercials showing before the actual movie starts? I arrived in the theatre 10 minutes before and already they were showing many ads. And then when the lights dimmed there were at least another 10 minutes of commercials. 

Finally the film began and immediately drew us into a crazy world. It opens with Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh), overwhelmed by all these receipts she needs to present to the Internal Revenue Service. Not only that but she is running a laundromat and worried about her father who has come to visit from China. Oh and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is gay and has a girlfriend who is white, and Evelyn's husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) wants a divorce.

Waymond, Evelyn and Gong Gong at the IRS

If that's not enough to handle on your plate, on the way to seeing the IRS agent Dierdre Beaubeirde (Jamie Lee Curtis) viewers suddenly have to deal with every character having an alternative persona in a different universe, and seeing Evelyn's life constantly flashing before our eyes.

And then wait! There's martial arts thrown in the mix with people from different universes coming to get Evelyn, and they gain their energy from doing bizarre things. In Evelyn's case it's drinking tons of soda pop and telling Deirdre that she loves her. 

Weird right?

The storyline for Everything Everywhere All At Once is completely off the wall crazy but somehow it all holds together that makes viewers laugh and tear up when it comes to the mother-daughter dynamic, expectations of immigrant parents and trying to forge a new path.

In the end it's about your life and what you make of it. 

Curtis is hilarious as a frumpy chubby woman! 

It turns out Evelyn wanted to get away from her parents and went to America with Waymond, who promised her the world and instead gave her a laundromat business. But there is another parallel universe where they didn't marry and she became a famous movie star, and he a wealthy businessman. 

She has to resolve her past in order to rectify her present and future. And that involves a lot of swift martial arts kicks and punches. 

Her relationship with her daughter Joy -- or rather her nemesis Jobu Tupaki becomes physically confrontational as they fight in different time periods and places, and at times it is hilariously treated with crayon animated drawings and pinatas of them and then they become zen-like as rocks in a desert.

The same could be said with the fantasy relationship between Evelyn and Dierdre -- who both seem to have fingers like raw hotdogs. How the directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert came up with this idea and for Curtis and Yeoh to pull it off... they must have laughed so hard filming those scenes.

Evelyn with her bizarre hot dog fingers

Again it all sounds so absurd, but it all comes together, representing different thoughts that can appear in our brain all at once. 

Yeoh is fantastic at Evelyn... her accent is a typical immigrant one that's Chinglish, but at the end she sounds more like herself with the slight British accent... was that intentional? She is the difficult mother to Hsu, who acts out her frustrations with eye rolls and attitude. 

The numerous fight scenes Yeoh had to do are very impressive for a 59-year-old! Take that Jackie Chan! They are choreographed like many martial arts films, and Everything Everywhere All At Once is an homage to them, with wacky props.

Quan is wonderful as Raymond who is the tender, long suffering husband of Evelyn, who also has a few fight scenes of his own. The former child actor also has a background in martial arts, though an injury sidelined him to become a consultant on films instead.

Hsu as Joy's nemesis Jobu Tupaki 

There is also the inclusion of James Hong as Evelyn's father who is a fixture in many films. It's a bit funny hearing Cantonese, Mandarin and English all the time, but director Kwan says he grew up listening to these languages mixed together.

When the film finally finishes at 140 minutes you think, "What did I just see?"

But when you strip it down, Everything Everywhere All At Once is about all of us, how we constantly have flashbacks of our lives and how these events shape us to who we are, everything, everywhere, all at once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schienert

140 minutes