Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

You’d have thought the last thing that we needed this year was another multiverse themed action adventure on top of the endless superhero quests. 2022 also saw the release of Marvel’s Doctor Strange: In The Multiverse Of Madness, and the year is closing with the trailer to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (really?) hitting our theaters. Everything Everywhere All at Once may share many similarities with Marvel’s efforts in branching out into different universes, (including being produced by the Russo brothers, them of Marvel fame) but A24’s film starring Michelle Yeoh as a disillusioned Laundromat owner (along with her husband, with whom she is equally tired) is a more inventive and impressive take on what has fast become a sub genre in the last eighteen months. Yeoh’s Evelyn begins the film by going to a meeting with her husband and her father; the IRS is auditing their Laundromat and Evelyn is struggling to cope with everything going on, including telling her Father that her daughter has a non-Chinese girlfriend. Whilst at the meeting, her husband Wayland is briefly taken over by Alpha-Wayland, a version of Wayland from the ‘Alphaverse’. He explains that every life choice creates a new parallel universe, and her daughter Joy is threatening every universe in existence and that Evelyn needs to accept and adapt to the multiverses in order to stop the Alphaverse version of her daughter. If it all sounds too much it’s because in the end it is, the film is way too stretched and overlong and you find it difficult to sympathize with Joy for huge stretches of the film. However, there’s no denying the films’ ambitious scope or impressive sequences, and there’s plenty of those. One of the opening fight sequences reminds you of Gareth Evans’ The Raid series (2006-2014) and another of ‘The Crazy 88’ fight in Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003). Both of those references are compliments to Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s vision, and the scenes where Yeoh has to swiftly travel through universes to pick up skills and techniques within seconds to put to use in whichever verse she’s really in are rather terrific to say the least. Everything Everywhere All At Once aims as high as its title suggests, and although it falls short by some distance; in a world (just the one, to my knowledge) that you’d think should be pretty fed up of this sort of thing by now, the film does enough to prove that if you’re inventive enough, there are still new and interesting ways to do this. Having said that, the films' winning of Best Picture at the Oscars was utterly ludicrous. 7.0/10