Everything Everywhere All at Once

Theaters:  March 2022

Streaming:  June 2022

Runtime:  139 minutes

Genre:  Action – Comedy – Fantasy – SciFi

els:  5.5/10 (8 for first half – 3 for second half)

IMDB:  8.0/10

Amazon:  4.4/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  95/100

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  88/100

Metacritic Metascore:  81/100

Metacritic User Score:  7.8/10

Awards: 4 Academy Awards – 4 Golden Globes

Directed by:  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Written by:  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Music by:  Son Lux

Cast:  Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis

Film Locations:  California, US

Budget:  $14.3 – 25 million

Worldwide Box Office:  $106 million

A wonderfully brilliant, light speed extravaganza of a show dazzling with talent, novelty, and invention. A pair of directors pulling together a complicated plot with aplomb, but one does need to pay attention. A screenplay of action and comedy with no plot holes that would have made Jackie Chan proud, who was initially slated to star in the movie, but the Daniels decided Michelle Yeoh provided more contrast. No argument from this quarter. Yeoh, Quan, Hong, and Curtis are superb, naturally melding into their parts where the viewer gives no thought to their offscreen persona or that they are acting.

The only distraction in the first half of the movie was Stephanie Hsu’s acting. She cannot walk and deliver lines at the same time. Her scenes should have been delivered from a hospital bed with thousands of tubes and wires, tying her down like a mummy on House unable to move and hopefully unable to speak.

The first half of the movie was 12 Oscar material then the second half happened. Picture yourself as an 8-year-old seated between your mom and dad, getting shushed and thumped for fidgeting, on a hard church pew listening to an old geezer in the pulpit delivering a monotone sermon on God only knows what and he, criminy, will not shut up. That’s the setting for the final 427 minutes of this movie. The Daniels genus turned to hubris cobbled together with no self-awareness of when to stop. By the end all the fun in the movie has evaporated and your soul has withered to that of a week-old bagel and transported itself to a perpetual B-movie drive-in.