Reviews: "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "Memory"

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

Late into Everything Everywhere All at Once, the latest adrenaline-fueled experience from the music video directors-turned-feature filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels), protagonist Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) utters these words of reassurance to several universes at once: “Even in a universe where have hot dogs for fingers, we get very good with our feet!” It is a statement which emblemizes the absurd, candy-coated intricacy of a film bursting with energetic soul. Within their increasingly ridiculous reality-hopping extravaganza, Daniels find a method of expressing love for everything and nothing all at once with an endearingly juvenile purity. It is an impossibly amiable affair, one of the most sheerly entertaining and unifying cinema experiences I have experienced in recent times. For anyone else seeking comfort in an uncertain era, it surely will be for you as well.

As with all great stories, Everything Everywhere finds universality in character specificity. Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American laundromat owner whose life has been failing her at every turn. Her husband Waymond (the endlessly affable Ke Huy Quan) is in the process of divorce. Her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) finds herself in the throes of teenage angst, and has recently come out as gay—a fact that Evelyn’s father Gong Gong (James Hong) finds difficult to accept. This only puts more pressure on Evelyn, whose failing laundromat business has been threatened by an incisive IRS auditor, played by a brilliantly terrifying Jamie Lee Curtis. In so many words: the world is ending, and Evelyn doesn’t know what to do.

And then another world presents itself. An alternate-universe Waymond, known as' Alpha Waymond of the Alphaverse (watch the movie), takes hold of regular-universe Waymond and informs Evelyn, Matrix-style, that she has two choices: wake up and save the multiverse from destruction, or remain stuck in her failed, boring existence. “You’re capable of anything because you are so bad at everything,” Alpha Waymond tells a confused Evelyn. And indeed she is: she soon learns to “verse-jump,” to hop between alternate-universe versions of herself with their own unique skillsets. A famous Chinese opera singer, a proficient martial artist, a slicing-and-dicing teppanyaki chef—all of these alternate versions help develop Evelyn’s individuality within her own universe.

This may seem like chaos for chaos’ sake (and the film does at times lean in this direction), but what is impressive is how Daniels manage to imbue each of their absurd movie-nerd scenarios with genuine emotion and philosophical intelligence. The film is, ultimately, about one’s struggle against nihilism—an especially pertinent concern in our current age of moral relativism and social media nervousness. It isn’t an accident that the final goal of Jobu Tupaki, the film’s multiversal antagonist, is to prove that “nothing matters.” Her method of doing so—putting everything, and I mean everything, onto a universe-consuming bagel—is perfectly in line with the film’s authenticity-via-silliness ethos.

After witnessing the multiverse’s infinite possibilities, Evelyn struggles to grasp how she could have possibly ended up in such a depressing existence. Why is she being punished with a failing laundromat when she could have lived as a famous actress? It’s a maximalist distillation of the profoundly human concern of struggling to accept reality for what it is. For as much as we daydream about the life that could have been, we’re stuck in our own shitty existence, and we must learn to live with that. This is a lesson that Everything Everywhere All at Once understands all too well. “Especially when we don’t know what’s going on, please be kind!” begs Waymond to a group of reality-hopping secret agents at one point in the film. It is a staggeringly simple reminder that the universe (and, indeed, the multiverse) is far, far too big to understand. And when we don’t understand, why choose anything less than compassion?

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an explosive cinematic achievement for a generation in need of cinematic affirmation. Never before have I seen a film alternate between shots of fanny-pack martial arts combat, touching family melodrama, and, strangest of all, two rocks sitting on the edge of a cliff contemplating existence, all within the course of thirty seconds or less—nor would I have expected to laugh and sob in equal measures at such abject wackiness. Daniels have created something astonishing here, a carnivalistic expression of metamodern joy, a rejection of existential angst in the face of infinite possibility. It is a film that perfectly conveys, in both structure and tone, the utter absurdity of life, reaffirming existence even as it plunges into meaninglessness. At a moment defined by competing realities and moral uncertainty, what more could you ask for? —James Fahey

Memory (Dir. Martin Campbell)

Liam Neeson just keeps on truckin’ in this latest from washed-up Casino Royale (2006) director Martin Campbell. Neeson plays Alex, Brian, John, whomever. His masculine “particular set of skills” stock character returns but this time—get this—he has Alzheimer’s. In the curious continuation of a trend found in recent post-Taken Neeson pictures such as Cold Pursuit (2019) and The Ice Road (2021), he finds himself competing for screen time with a host of sterile cops and criminals. All one wants from a Neeson thriller is some good henchman-bashing, but with Memory, you have to put up with a continual procession of uninspired gravel-voiced comic-macho coppers, all trying rather desperately to be the toughest in the room.

Guy Pearce does what he can with The Punisher (2017) producer Dario Scardapane’s sterile dialogue, but to no avail. Monica Bellucci is … also there, cranking out clunky lines without enthusiasm. If you can’t already tell, I’m really struggling to come up with anything interesting to say about this aesthetic vacuum of a film. Shot on a Bulgarian backlot, it doesn’t seem like any real effort has been put into the production. One wonders what keeps Neeson going, what drives him to make countless paint-by-numbers thrillers. Does he have to pay off the mortgage on his summer home? Does Martin Scorsese not pay as well as you’d think? I thought perhaps Neeson takes the same approach to acting as does, say, Harrison Ford, a man who considers himself a contractor—a tradesman like any other who just happens to work in front of a camera. Ford reluctantly shows up for genuine blockbusters like the upcoming Indiana Jones 5, then spends the rest of his time buggering about trying not to crash his hobby planes. Neeson, inexplicably, seems to be constantly working on henchman-bashing pictures made by such esteemed studios as Europacorp. Just one of life’s little mysteries, I suppose. 

There is a single memorable moment in Memory, for which I am unable to conjure up an explanation. Neeson breaks into the identikit home of an identikit gangster and summarily dispatches him as an electrician might install some copper-wiring. This child-trafficking crime boss has a safe installed in his bookshelf, but the contents of the safe are not what catch the eye. In a close-up of an evidence-laden USB stick, or money, or whatever it was, the gangster, living in El Paso, Texas, has surrounded his safe with a peculiar collection of cheap hardbacks penned by D-list British television personalities. Books by Peter Kay, Fern Britton, Freddie Flintoff, et al. line the walls of the brutal child-pornographer’s study. This mystery alone is more engaging than the entirety of Memory. Did some British production designer have them in their suitcase? Did Neeson leave them lying around, only for a runner to understandably assume that books like that could only ever be used as background filler? Does Campbell know something we don’t, that perhaps Kay, Britton, and Flintoff are involved in a transatlantic child trafficking organisation? This, like Neeson’s career choices, is a mystery that film scholars of the future will ponder ad infinitum. —Alexander Ferrier