'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Review

This is what great entertainment looks like.

Everything Everywhere All at Once - 2022 - Directed by Daniels - Action, Sci-Fi, Drama, Comedy - R - 2h 19m

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Watching Everything Everywhere All at Once is like drinking a glass of ice-cold water on a hot summer day. It’s deeply refreshing. In a desolate movie theater landscape where only giant comic book films seem to thrive, this movie feels like it comes from another time, a time when an indie film with a modest budget could still dream big—and win big.

For anyone who doesn’t know what the movie is about, good. The less you know the better. The most I’ll say about the plot is that it plays with the multiverse theory. What you really need to know is that everything you would want in a movie is here. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. It has great action. And to tie it all together, it has a touching family story that will make your eyes well up. Watching it in a full theater, we all saw how special this was—a rare communal experience where everyone was in stitches, in tears, and in wonder simultaneously. This is what great entertainment looks like.

The movie moves fast and hits hard. The multiverse set-up is a lot to take in, but with the masterful direction of the Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) and the charming performances of the whole cast (Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis), it never leaves you behind. Laughter is its secret weapon. The Daniels use their perfect comedic timing both to relieve the pressure of its more serious moments and to push the multiverse concept into hilarious extremes. But the humor never becomes overpowering. The emotions here are real, and so are the stakes. When it’s time to cry, the Daniels know when to pull back on the jokes. It’s a seamless balancing act and is the pinnacle of storytelling awareness.

The amount of love poured into this film is inspiring, with a dedication to filmmaking craft that is as disciplined as it is unrestrained. Later in the film, there’s an amazing shot of every possible multiverse flashing by in seconds—each image lovingly dressed but seen only for an instant. The amount of work it takes to put a sequence like that together is staggering. Its ambitions rival that of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, and it does it all on a meager $25 million budget (to put that in perspective, Spiderman: No Way Home, which also uses the multiverse theory as a plot point, had a $200 million price tag). To pull off a concept like this, with a budget that tight, takes a huge amount of inventiveness—which the Daniels and their entire team seem to have an unlimited supply of.

Fun, intelligence, and emotion don’t have to be exclusive of each other. The greatest entertainment films manage to hit on all three and Everything Everywhere All at Once can confidently join that pantheon, going down as one of the greatest—and the most fun—films of all time.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once is playing only in theaters.

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