Everything Everywhere All at Once

Directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once follows Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang as she’s caught up in a wild adventure involving the multiverse. Filmmakers Kwan and Scheinert admittedly do a solid job of initially drawing the viewer into the lengthy proceedings, as Everything Everywhere All at Once opens with a deliberate yet striking opening stretch that effectively establishes the central character and her less-than-ideal circumstances – with the decent-enough atmosphere heightened by Yeoh’s typically compelling performance and Kwan and Scheinert’s stylish visuals. It’s only as the central character’s aforementioned multiverse exploits kick off that one’s attention and interest begins to steadily dwindle, as the movie, beyond a certain point, adopts an often unreasonably frenetic feel that becomes more and more difficult to stomach – with the increasingly arms-length vibe compounded by a continuing emphasis on underwhelming, aggressively broad elements. (There is, for example, an almost extraordinarily tedious and silly subplot concerning a universe wherein people have hot dogs for fingers.) There’s consequently little doubt that Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s forward momentum is, particularly in the midsection and second half, entirely non-existent, and although it does possess a very small handful of engaging interludes (eg a mercifully quiet and tender scene involving two rocks), the picture wears out its welcome long before arriving at its less-than-satisfying final stretch and is, in the end, an ambitious misfire that just doesn’t, for the most part, actually work.

* out of ****