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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
I was mugged back in 1997 in my Silver Lake neighborhood, a block from my apartment. I saw two men walking toward me and my instincts said to cross the street. But I thought it would make me look like a jerk, so I kept going, and they grabbed me. Something similar happened when I saw a preview for “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” My instincts said to cross the street, but I kept going (right into the theater) and damn it if I didn’t get mugged again.
In place of physical blows, the movie used loud music, blinding strobe-lights, mind-numbing incoherence and repulsive imagery as its assault, like a cinematic version of enhanced interrogation techniques. (Seriously, if you ever want me to spill state secrets, tie me to a chair and play Son Lux’s emetic score). Directed with infantile glee by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (like little boys igniting their farts and burning ants with a magnifying glass), “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is the same old played-out story about evil threatening to destroy the world, repackaged for the short-attention-span generation. Once again, we’re in a multiverse, that tired excuse for laziness disguised as imagination. And since nothing needs to make sense in the multiverse, every idea, no matter how idiotic gets lobbed at the wall like monkey-thrown poo, and instantly crammed into the already overloaded script. And the poor actors. To say the best performance in the film is given by a rock (not Dwayne Johnson, an actual rock) is perhaps unkind but it’s unfortunately true. Though they try as hard as humanly possible (and Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis all get an A-plus for effort), due to the arbitrary nature of the ‘story,’ in which disconnected moments are shot willy nilly at the audience with the randomness of a bingo caller, none of the performances are allowed to build: There are no scenes to help the actors create a character; it’s all montage.
For all I know, Michelle Yeoh may have given the performance of her career. But like the movie itself, the portrayal has no shape: Moments may be occasionally involving but they’re not placed in any meaningful sequence, so it doesn’t build. And no matter how hard the directors reach for meaning, there is none to be found. The film is a ‘nothing’ bagel smeared with every imaginable ingredient but tasting like ashes. To be fair, the dialog was more often than not swamped by ambient noise in the ridiculously inefficient sound mix, so it’s possible that buried under the wet cement score and endless screaming, some hidden significance was revealed. But with all the characters eating snot, mutilating themselves, projectile vomiting, and homophobically shoving things in their butts (just so the audience can go “Ewww! Look, how gross! That guy put something in his butt!”), it’s not surprising I may have missed the point. Even so, there are a few beautiful scenes: In one of the universes, Yeoh is an opera singer, and every time the movie lands on her serenely still, gorgeously lit and costumed character, standing onstage singing (or preparing to sing), the film suddenly works. Mostly because Lux’s hectoring, pleading and pummeling score finally calms the fuck down and morphs into something delicate and lovely. But it lasts for all of thirty seconds and then we’re off to the demolition derby again, and I’m reaching for the Tylenol. Then, miraculously, at about the two hour point, after being body-slammed into a stupor, the hyperactive migraine of a movie comes to a sudden stop and we find ourselves on a barren (AND SILENT) mountaintop with two gentle-looking rocks overlooking a prehistoric horizon-wide vista. And, not unlike the feeling you get when your neighbors gardener finally shuts off the leaf blower, or the Novocaine kicks in, or you take your hand out of a pot of boiling water - the relief is so overwhelming that tears are likely to well up your eyes (they did in mine). For a moment, it almost seems as if something profound is about to happen: that all the rubbish leading up to the entrance of the rocks has just been a pretext for showing us what stillness could do, could be. Here, suddenly is the answer to the chronic ‘disorder’ threatening the movie’s multiverse. Then the directors, (those scamps), afraid that their audience might get bored or reach for their phones, have the rocks start talking to each other via some cutesy subtitles (which is the closest this septically unfunny movie came to making me smile), and we’re off, rampaging again.
The final twenty minutes are a repetitious, ungainly grab for validity as Yeoh’s mother tries to connect with her unhappy daughter (Hsu) while simultaneously attempting to - wait for it! - stop the multiverse from being sucked into a whirling vortex of nothingness. Yet for all the movie’s lip service to the dangers of entropy and depression, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is actually an open-armed invitation to wallow in both. (The entire experience is so depressing I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoloft was a major investor). And contrary to its purported message of hope, it is instead a love letter to chaos. With grim determination (and forced jollity) it backs us into an untenable corner where accepting futility and ‘settling’ seem to be the only solution. Where (to use Orwellian doublespeak) “Conforming IS Rebellion.” IN THEATERS PHOTOs COURTESY OF A24
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And after being yanked and shoved from universe to universe at a nauseatingly accelerated pace, never feeling anything but a combination of disorientation and the emotional shutdown that comes from being constantly yelled at, I couldn’t tell you how (or if) any of the characters had modulated, or grown or changed. 
