- Starring
- Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis
- Directors
- Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sc-Fi
- Release date
- Jun 7, 2022
- Where to watch
- Showtime
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a stunningly beautiful movie full of rich visuals and excellent performances all masterfully crafted by directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (of nothing you’ve ever heard of or watched before).
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who has been ground down by her life choices. The movie begins with her in the midst of a potentially ruinous audit by the IRS, her marriage on the rocks, and her late-teen/20-something daughter miserable and on the knife’s edge of being estranged from her.
Just when things don’t seem like they can get any worse, the entire universe is turned upside down and inside out, nearly literally. You see, Evelyn is the key to saving the multiverse, and she must master he abilities if there is any hope of stopping Jobu Tupaki from ending all of creation.
While Everything Everywhere All At Once is primarily a plot-driven piece, the performances and chemistry of its cast only serve to enrich it, giving us a reason to care about all of the craziness that is happening. I do mean craziness; from nunchuck dildos to hotdog fingers, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a zany and wild ride.
Yeoh’s Wang follows a pretty traditional hero’s journey, even if the mechanism of the journey is rather exceptional, and Ke Huy Quan, who played Short Round in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, gives a beautiful performance as Yeoh’s sweet and loving husband, Waymond.
In the wake of the accolades that Yeoh has been receiving for her part in the film, Quan’s performance has been overshadowed and all but forgotten by the media. Quite frankly, he’s wonderful in this film, effortlessly switching from one Waymond to a radically alternate-universe variant with utter perfection and ease. Just like Temple of Doom, he is the heart of this movie, and it made me feel his absence from American cinema these many years all the more.
That’s not to say that Yeoh doesn’t deserve the attention that she’s getting. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, she shows that she is as much a leading lady as she is a skilled action star. Her performance is subtle and heartfelt, and she effortlessly takes the audience along on her characters’s emotional journey.
That being said, in my opinion, the hands-down-standout performance in this film has got to be Jamie Lee Curtis (Knives Out, the Halloween series). She may only be a supporting character but she gives a hilariously fun turn as Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a dry and miserable IRS auditor/evil acolyte/WWE wrestler/etc. She steals every scene, chewing up scenery like a hungry vole, and one can almost forget what an annoying Leftist weenie she appears to be in real life.
At its heart, Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a multiverse-spanning sci-fi epic but a deceptively simple story about family dynamics, the road not taken, and learning to appreciate what you have rather than dwelling on what could have been.
However, as good as it is, the film isn’t quite as deep as it thinks it is. Its ultimate message is slightly muddled and feels a bit self-congratulatory, however, only slightly.
With nearly perfect pacing, fun characters, smart dialogue, and an engaging story, if you can forgive its single Woke conceit, Everything Everywhere All At Once is an excellent way to spend 2h and 19m.
WOKE REPORT
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
Other forces cringe woke elements: Dildo anal awards, dildo weapons, trans women/male dresses, gay glitter.
In almost every scene, forced down out eyes.
Beta male, males being punished. Men being killed by girls, very woke.
What the hell are are “forced down out eyes”? Every other criticism is fine but this one just sounds like something you made up.
Sorry, but I gotta agree with the other comment from ‘straight men’. – very woke. I couldn’t push passed the heavy attention on all the aforementioned elements that forces its viewers to ingest.
Perhaps the movie gets better after the 20 minutes I saw, but if you stuff the audiences eyes with your real world political agendas from the get go, I’m sorry but Hollywood has lost its way and is killing solid story writing.
Thanks for doing these, James. I just discovered this website. Good to get an honest take and avoid the woke nonsense
Between the review and the comments I think I’ll skip it – too woke!
This is extremely woke. It was not enjoyable to watch and left a bad taste in my mouth. There’s so much woman-splaining going on in this movie.
Apparently, the person who reviewed this liked the movie. I did not. You may have a different experience. And, it’s definitely not as a deep as it thinks it is; there are times when you see the man being not-so-subtly hinted as being Satan (the upside down cross over the shoulder…)
Worst media take ever. This film is incredibly woke.
Incomparable with anything ever made, Everything Everywhere is amazing, one of the greatest films in recent years. Michelle Yeoh is a fantastically talented actress, and Ke Huy Quan’s return to acting is caringly done. Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis fill their respective roles with candor, Curtis with bracing comedy and Hsu with love towards her parents in the film, Yeoh and Quan. The Daniels, above all, are incredibly hilarious with their independent style of filmmaking, nothing is definable and everything is original, thoroughly earning their incredibly moving film’s ambitious title. It is true that the film blatantly displays ‘inclusion and representation’, but this is more than made up for in the film’s front-most unbreaking family bond.
you’re a WOKESCOLD!!!!!!!!!! THE WOKE MOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! banned YOU’RE BANNED
Did you have a brain aneurism @fart? You should get help for that.
Even if we ignore the wokeness, this film is absolutely awful. It’s like Reddit made a film. 87%? What the hell?
This film is worth it, despite the woke elements. One of the most annoying element being that of the daughter. She’s very annoying, then to make her a lesbian and try revolving the storyline and plot around her lesbianism…was painfully executed and weakened the film a lot. To me this was a film of a woman engulfed in life and all its struggles. This has caused her to become frustrated, bitter, ungrateful, and fed up with her lot in life, perhaps? She is led on a journey, by her husband, who is or is not who she thought to be. Her journey is what was interesting to watch…and it could’ve been written without her daughter being gay or so very petty and annoying.
I feel the review misses the point of this website. I’d like to read it and understand why or how the film is or isn’t woke. I don’t really care as much for the film critique.
Spoiler: a key plot conflict is whether or not the girl’s family will welcome her girlfriend. The mom is vindicated by forcing her dad to accept it.
That’s why we include the Woke Elements section. However, you have to be a logged in user to see them.
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