It's received rave reviews, but is Everything Everywhere All at Once worth the hype? Read the fifth and eighth letters of the eighth word in this sell text...
Directors: Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan
Running time: 139 minutes
It’s got a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s received five-star reviews from the likes of Empire and IGN. It’s been described as “like nothing you’ve ever seen”. But is Everything Everywhere All at Once really as good as people make it out to be? Why yes, yes it is. Packed with incredible action, yet underpinned by an intensely emotional story, this is one of the most unique, exciting and outright insane films in recent memory - and it’s one that’s best seen on the big screen.
This “emotional story” follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner who is trying to balance family dramas with running her business and keeping on top of taxes. Just as her livelihood looks on the brink of collapse, a multiversal version of her husband, Waymand (Ke Huy Quan), traverses to our universe to warn of impending doom for life as we know it - and only our lowly Evelyn, who is chosen precisely because of her inadequacy, can step up to save the day.
If this sounds like a mad premise for a film, that’s because it very much is. As they proved with Swiss Army Man, Daniels - the two-person directorial team behind Everything Everywhere - have little interest in logic or simplicity. They go bold and existential with their storytelling, and it’s all the better for it. Throughout this movie, they visualise nihilism as a giant bagel, travel to worlds where people are born with hot dogs for fingers, and drop in a slow-motion shot of a muscular security guard launching himself across a room to land on a butt plug. It’s utterly deluded, but also delightfully entertaining.
Despite all of the hype surrounding this film, Everything Everywhere All at Once is as good as, if not better than, you’d expect
The fight choreography in this film is a thing of beauty. By minute twenty of Everything Everywhere, Quan’s Waymand is taking on a group of adversaries using only a fanny pack, cracking skulls and slamming bodies with the cartoonish, over-the-top absurdity of Kingsman: The Secret Service. It throws realism out the window, replacing it instead with playfulness. Without the big budget of the Fast & Furious franchise or Marvel Cinematic Universe, this movie’s group of seven - yes, just seven - visual effects supervisors and artists, along with the stunt coordinators and special effects teams, put together a pure spectacle, wowing audiences with stunning sequences.
For all its multiverse-spanning madness, though, what makes this really impactful is the drama at its core, the touching tale of one family who are at the risk of falling apart, working to stay together. By the time Quan is monologuing about the power of kindness late on, it’s almost impossible to stop the waterworks from flowing. At a time of such division and anger in the world, it is refreshing to see a film that shuns the melodramatic appeal of nihilism to promote the importance of love and tolerance - and it does so with remarkable effectiveness.
Despite all of the hype surrounding this film - including from this writer, who chose it as the film to watch this year - Everything Everywhere All at Once is as good as, if not better than, you’d expect. It’s fun, it’s frantic, and it’s really fucking weird. But it’s also full of heart, building its crazy story from a place of authentic emotion. Simply put, it’s everything you want from a big screen movie - and you should go and watch it on the big screen at once.
Did you know? To keep plot details under wraps before the trailer was released, the official IMDb synopsis read "a woman tries to do her taxes".
Everything Everywhere All at Once is showing at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 26 May
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