Everything Everywhere All at Once

2hrs 19mins (15)

The multiverse is back in this divisive cult hit ★★★

In the US and elsewhere, the critics have swooned over Everything Everywhere All at Once. So it was “disconcerting” to find it a bit of a dud – “frantically hyperactive” and also rather dull, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The veteran action star Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a downtrodden Chinese immigrant to the US who runs a “scuzzy” laundromat with her dopey husband (Ke Huy Quan). But just as a tax audit threatens to make her life yet tougher, she discovers that there are a host of alternate realities in which her life has turned out better: in one of the worlds she visits, she is a martial arts expert; in another she’s a movie star. The entire multiverse is in peril, however, and only Evelyn can save it. It sounds fun and there are some “nice gags”, but the film boils down to a “mad succession of consequence-free events”, which goes at such a clip you never care about the characters. I found it “a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time”.

It’s not perfect, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. It does feel messy, “overstuffed and a trifle exhausting” – but it’s also “exhilarating, funny and moving”. Admittedly, the multiverse idea is hardly new: it was taken for a spin in Marvel’s most recent Dr Strange movie; but this film has “a gajillion times” more warmth and wit, and is made by two writer-directors who seem to be fizzing with creativity, at a time when cinema feels “starved of fresh ideas”. “You could keep tallying the pros and cons” of this sci-fi comedy all day, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. The fact is, I have rarely felt more “impaled on the fence by a film” because, “exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim”.