'Everything Everywhere All At Once' turns mayhem to boredom
A24
I loved Daniels’ “Swiss Army Man,” which turned an outrageous-sounding concept—opportunity to jet ski on a farting corpse interrupts suicide attempt, leads to friendship—into an oddly beautiful examination of universal human experience and mistakes. Its reach and grasp matched up to form something unique and bizarrely moving.
With the unjustly praised “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” though, the filmmakers take the most complicated path to something very simple about overly busy lives and the possible versions of ourselves that might exist with different choices along the way. It’s visually restless, thematically redundant and the rare movie to be both overwhelming and underwhelming. After only a little while, you’ll desperately long to be simply whelmed.
Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan star as Evelyn and Waymond, proprietors of a laundromat facing divorce and an IRS audit, along with frustration from their teenage daughter (Stephanie Hsu). If Evelyn felt distracted before, her challenges multiply by about 50 billion when she learns about the many, many universes that exist simultaneously and she and her family begin hopping from one place to another, allowing Daniels to play with pop culture references, jump across genres and create the sensation both that anything is possible and nothing matters for more than a couple seconds at a time. It’s either the ultimate argument for being present or the most monotonous example of stakes-free randomness. I say the latter.
The writing is just splattering paint at the wall, and the performances (including Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS agent) never click either. If you are intrigued by hot dog fingers or warped twists on movies you know, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” might explode into a dizzying chance to consider generic interpersonal conflict and distract from going anywhere useful with it. That the oppressive runtime and slapdash editing resulted in antisemitism is just one of many reasons why this exhausting slog breaks itself into tiny pieces and never comes close to reassembling into something worthwhile. It’s a lot, and at no point did I feel invested, and neither my eyes nor my brain were stimulated. Its jokes are embarrassing, and its structure is amateurism posing as boundary-crossing.
There’s no question that complicated lives create roadblocks for everyday appreciation. It’s much less clear how so many have seen “Everything Everywhere All At Once” as anything more than a stylistic “What if?” that flexes what’s possible without considering what’s good.
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