Movie review: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Published 3:45 pm Wednesday, April 13, 2022
- Ke Huy Quan is a kind and goofy husband in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
This movie is perfect. No notes.
After their first feature, the weird and wonderful film “Swiss Army Man” (2016), the Daniels (directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) have once again created something weird and wonderful and worthy of so much recognition and praise.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is trippy, beautiful to look at and heartfelt in every frame. Considering the time of year, it could make a great addition to your 420-viewing list, but beyond the visual feast, the story is so irreverently funny and grippingly imaginative that it’s great to watch stone-cold sober.
With so many stories about multiverses showing up in franchises across the cinema-scape lately, the thought of an original film tackling the idea of multiple universes and multiple selves throughout those verses seems incredibly ambitious. Marvel, for instance, has been building up to its own multiverse for over a decade and has an ever-growing list of projects to mine ideas from to build out their crossover storytelling. With “Everything,” however, the Daniels hone it down to one family, and one woman in particular, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and they are able to make you incredibly invested in her own multiverse of madness within the first 20 minutes of the movie and make the rest of the over two-hour run time feel like no time at all.
That is basically the end of the comparisons between this gorgeous film and the juggernauts on the other side of the film spectrum because this movie is something entirely different and freshly ambitious.
Evelyn is a struggling business owner who has a tax lien on her laundromat and is in danger of losing everything. Between the piles of receipts, trying to run the business along with her loving and goofy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) trying to come out to Evelyn’s elderly father, Gong Gong (James Hong), and the IRS agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) itching to close them down, it’s a lot to handle.
So when Evelyn is visited by the Alpha-verse version of Waymond, who explains that he has traveled for years looking for the one Evelyn who would be able to stop the evil Jobu Tupaki from destroying all the universes as they know them, she accepts the mission to help. Evelyn begins jumping into different versions of herself with different skills in order to take on those on Jobu Tupaki’s side when they begin popping up in her universe.
The overall themes of regret, family ties, life choices and ultimately choosing kindness in the face of the unknown are presented very early on in the film, but the journey from there is something so fun to watch unfold that you don’t expect the film’s heart to hit you so hard by the end. And boy, is that heart something to see.
Every single cast member is perfect in their role, and each gets to essentially play different personalities throughout.
Yeoh, who has always been amazing, showcases so much in Evelyn from the frantic, stressed-out mom/wife/business owner to the butt-kicking, universe-bending action hero. Her performance already has a lot of buzz around it, and I just hope that come time for awards season, voters don’t forget her.
However great she is, it’s her supporting cast that goes all in on this ride of a film, and it is in part because of them that she shines so brightly. Ke Huy Quan in particular buoys “Everything” with his delightful Waymond, who puts googly eyes on things because he says objects are just happier with them, wants so badly to be noticed again by Evelyn, and is just plain kind to everyone. He then transforms on a dime into all the other versions of Waymond that make their way into the film, from confident action-hero Waymond to the wealthy, self-assured one. It’s just so delightful to see the kid from “Indiana Jones” and “The Goonies” break the audience’s hearts, then make them swell, all in a span of about five minutes.
The script is also something of a marvel. Not only is it well written, it includes a mix of Mandarin, Cantonese and English, sometimes all at once, which feels very true to an immigrant family and lends a sliver of realism to a film that is anything but real.
It has been a very long time since I have left a theater giddy to rush back and see the movie again, but with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” I had that urge to turn on a heel and march right on back. It’s everything that good filmmaking is and should be, and it’s something that should be seen by everyone at least once.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
139 minutes
Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language
4 stars