This absurdist fantasy proved to be another in a series of acclaimed American indie films that did not leave the expected impression on me. I just couldn’t fathom what was so fun, hilarious, or ingenious in this escapist papacy about a middle-aged Chinese woman who will fight in multiple dimensions to save the world. And the previous film made by the duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert or collectively Daniels “The Swiss Army Man” did not sit well with me, and such is the case with “Everything Everywehere All at Once”, although it says that there are bright moments. Still, most of the time it was tiring and tiring for me, just as tiring, tedious, and completely pointless movies about superheroes that Daniel apparently wanted to parody, among other things, were.
It seems to me that Danieli here has tried to perform something similar to what Tarantino performed with “Kill Bill,” but these little guys have to eat a lot more porridge to be able to come to the same sentence with Quentin at all. It is a film with numerous references to various films, and this film has a long title and is equally dedicated to East Asian martial arts as much as “The Matrix”, “Odyssey in Space”, Wong-kar Wai’s films, “Big Trouble in Little China” and “Ratatouille”. “. But it simply wasn’t a movie for my boss, even though it’s an extremely likable idea that is technically extremely well executed. The spotlight is on Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a middle-aged American Chinese woman and laundry owner whose husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is just planning to hand out divorce papers. Her hard-working grandfather Gong Gong (James Hong) has just arrived from China, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) desperately wants her mother to accept her girlfriend Becky.
The biggest problem for Evelyn is the tax administration blowing around her neck, and taxman Diedre (Jamie Lee Curtis who acts like she’s top notch) is no longer listening to Evelyn’s pleas for a tax deferral. And while Evelyn in the tax building is trying to appease the taxman to meet her once again, the door of other dimensions (Multiverse) will begin to open. It turns out that her husband is occupied by Waymond from another dimension and he will explain to her that there are countless dimensions in which everyone, including Evelyn, lives some different lives based on different life decisions than those they made. Every life choice here creates a different universe, so in one Evelyn is an actress and a star, in the other she is a kung fu nun, etc. And of course there is a villain who wants to destroy the worlds and she will be the one who can save the universe.
In terms of genre, it was very difficult to place this film anywhere because practically all genres are covered here, but beneath all this savagery, various dimensions, countless universes and SF madness, there is actually a family tragicomedy, a story about Chinese immigrants in America and their life problems and emotional a drama about love between mother and daughter. Of course, all this is camouflaged in an absurdist fantasy that in an interesting way seems to be trying to find an answer to the question of what the meaning of life is and how something beautiful can be created from complete chaos in the end. And all of these topics are interestingly packaged there, but I just didn’t have that litter.
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