Tag: 2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once

  By

★★★½
“I’d have settled for two of three.”

This has been a long, long time coming. I’ve been a fan of Yeoh since seeing her Hong Kong starring debut, Yes, Madam, which came out all the way back in 1985. Over the years since, her career has had its ups and downs, including complete retirement after her marriage in the late eighties. She returned, and is the only actress to have appeared in two movies rated five stars here: Heroic Trio and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But her career in Hollywood has been limited to sterling support roles, in both movies and television, encompassing everything from Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies through Star Trek: Discovery to Crazy Rich Asians. A starring role, appropriate to her talents, never seemed to come along. 

Until now. Thirty-seven years after Yes, Madam, and at the age of 59, this film finally puts Yeoh where she deserves to be: front and centre. Yet, perhaps partly due to how long I’ve been waiting for this, I must confess to being a bit disappointed this is not a classic to match the titles listed above. Oh, it certainly has its moments, and Yeoh is as good as expected. However, its 139-minute running-time feels more a curse than a blessing. The concept at its core is almost infinite in scope, and I did feel the movie was trying to include all of it. Less could have been more, with a targetted approach preferable to the relentless overload adopted by the makers, which left me feeling as if I was drinking from a fire-hose.

The multiverses here literally rotate around Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), who runs a laundromat teetering on the edge of failure, with her husband, Waymond (Quan). Their marriage is also failing, her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Hsu) is on rocky ground, and she has to go to an appointment with hard-ass IRS tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Curtis). The last is where things kick off, as she is visited by a Waymond from an alternate universe, who tells Evelyn she is the only hope of foiling the evil Jobu Tupaki. That’s an alternate Joy, who has gone insane and created a black hole-like vortex which could destroy all the multiverses. Fortunately, Evelyn’s abject failings at life give her the ability to tap into all the skills and knowledge of the other, better versions of herself.

Like I said: almost infinite in scope. Apparently, co-writer/director Kwan was diagnosed with ADHD during the creative process: to be frank, it shows. While the imagination on view is admirable, the film bounces about between ideas at a ferocious rate, almost regardless of whether they deserve it. We spend an inordinate amount of time in a multiverse where everyone has long, floppy fingers. Yet there is also buttplug-fu, which is an example of the movie going places you’d never have expected could be so entertaining. Or a lengthy, surprisingly engrossing, scene in which two rocks in an otherwise lifeless multiverse have a conversation in captions. Because why not?

To the film’s credit, it never abandons its characters, and that helps keep it grounded. Albeit only just, on occasion the movie standing on its tippy-toes as it tries desperately to avoid being blown away by its own excesses. It’s perhaps telling that, despite all the film’s visual bluster, the most effective moment for me was among the simplest, one character telling another, “In another life, I would’ve been happy just doing laundry and taxes with you.” As such, Yeoh is the story’s heart, and gets to demonstrate her unquestionable acting talent. It has been fascinating to see the development of that, especially considering her lack of not just experience but any formal training. I mean, she first entered the field close to four decades ago, as a former Miss World contestant. How many of them eventually go on to get talk of an Oscar?

It’s as a result of this that I kept watching the film, because I genuinely cared what happened to Evelyn. I wanted to see her figure it all out and make peace with the various forces trying to tear her humdrum life apart. From that angle, it’s close to soap-opera, albeit an unusually effective one. Except, of course, the means by which that peace is potentially achieved, includes multiverse hopping, and fighting an evil version of your own daughter, who wields a gurgling plughole of doom. It’s the overlap between the mundane and bizarre where this finds its own voice. The problem is, it tries too hard to live up to the title. Sure, give us everything, everywhere. I’d just rather it hadn’t done so, all at once.

Yet, similarly, it leaves an awful lot of potential on the table. Why is kung-fu virtually the only talent Evelyn uses? Tap into a universe where she’s a cab driver, and give us an epic car-chase. Or the one where she’s a cat-burglar, for heist purposes. It’s not hard to come up with a dozen such threads. Perhaps the makers were constrained by their budget, a relatively cheap $25 million – less than Crazy Rich Asians. They do an admirable job of squeezing value out of it; again, the sheer pace probably helps, with your brain trying so desperately to keep up, it’s hard-pushed to pay attention to any of the finer details.

But I’m glad I won’t go to my grave with my final paid cinematic experience being Terminator: Dark Fate. [Though the two Neanderthals beside us, talking loudly and checking their phones throughout, really make me think we are done with theatres] The Daniels deserve credit for the obvious invention displayed, and this is the kind of original property I’m happy to support, over another sequel and/or shitty comic adaptation. I also must mention the supporting cast, who are uniformly great, particularly Hsu as both aggravated daughter and multiiverse threatening villainess [There’s also a cameo by another eighties Hong Kong action actress, Michiko Nishiwaki. Maybe she’ll get her own movie next?]. That it stars one of the most under-rated actresses in Hollywood, finally getting the opportunity she deserves, is alone reason enough to see this. Just don’t expect too much.

Dir: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis

Black Crab

  By

★★★
“Let slip the slogs of war…”

Rapace seems to be turning into a female version of Ryan Reynolds. By which I mean, it seems that hardly a month goes past without a new Netflix Original coming out starring her. Ryan had 6 Underground, Red Notice and The Adam Project. Noomi has given us What Happened to Monday, The Trip and, now, this. Still, much as with Reynolds, I’m happy to see her working regularly, and while the results may be a bit variable, they’re usually worth a look. This is no different, though I’m not sure whether its story, driven by a (largely generic) war in the Eastern half of Europe, is helped or hurt by its timing. On the one hand, it gives this a certain “ripped from the headlines” topicality. On the other, I largely watch movies to escape everyday life, not have my nose rubbed in it.

Rapace plays Caroline Edh, who was split up from her daughter in the war’s early stages and has never been able to find her in the years since, as the conflict has turned her homeland into a meat-grinder. Now a soldier, she gets talked into a perilous mission that could turn the tide of the war, with the promise that her child is on the far end of it. She’ll be part of a group of six, skating across a treacherous frozen archipelago in enemy territory, to deliver a package – with the usual, stern “Don’t dare open it” warnings – to a research facility.

I do wonder why they sent a group: it’s not as if the package is large. One person, the quickest skater going undercover, could potentially slide beneath the radar, when a platoon of soldiers attracts more attention. I suspect it’s simply so the various perils, of thin ice, enemy combatants and unfriendly locals, can thin the herd of the operation. Some of them are so thinly-drawn, the makers might as well have slapped a red shirt on them, and been done with it. However, it’s still an impressively filmed, brutal slog of a journey, across a hellish landscape, which will have you reaching for a warm blanket and cup of cocoa. This likely reaches its peak when the group stumble into an ice graveyard: it’s quite the imagery.

We are, of course, here for Rapace, who learned to skate and broke her nose during filming. Despite one of the ugliest hair-styles in her filmography, her performance, along with the visuals, keep things adequately interesting, when the plot and supporting characters often fail to do so. In particular, the last half-hour (though it runs 114 minutes, so there’s quite a lot before that point) is almost entirely predictable, with the big twist actually weakening the lead character, by making Edh seem too gullible for her own good. Consequently, the subsequent redemption feels a bit too much of an uphill struggle. And even a novice like me knows that skating uphill is a tough ask…

Dir: Adam Berg
Star: Noomi Rapace, Jakob Oftebro, Dar Salim, Ardalan Esmaili

The 355

  By

★★★
“Mission reasonably possible”

I went into this preparing to hate it. There had been red flags all over the place, such as star and producer Chastain coming out with comments about her movie like, “It’s very important for society. We’ve moved against the status quo, and we’re creating our own narrative for it. The film is, in some sense, a political act.” Uh-oh. No film is ever “very important for society.” It’s a film. The good news, however, is this is perfectly watchable without worrying about such things. While it may have been created as a female-led story, it’s much more identifiable as a generic spy romp, in which the protagonists roam the world in pursuit of some threatening item, on which the bad guys want to get their hands. Hooray for the equality of mediocrity!

In this case, Item X is a black box that lets its owner do anything at all on the Internet, from hacking emails to crashing planes. It was found in a raid on a Colombian drug lord’s lair, where it came into possession of a soldier who now wants to sell it. Initially, a deal is brokered to sell it to the CIA, and agent “Mace” Browne (Chastain) is sent to Paris to complete the transaction. However, the meeting goes badly wrong, so Browne has to team up with a United Nations of other intelligence operatives, to stop it falling into the wrong hands, which could bring about unspeakable horrors. Such as nobody being able to post their thoughts on Twitter.

It’s all rather predictable, and quite remarkable how, after being cut off by the CIA, Mace is still able to commandeer aircraft and whatever other resources she needs. As the tagline above suggests, it’s all more than a bit evocative of another spy franchise in tone, though in most ways, feels like a Good Value version thereof. Chastain isn’t quite Tom Cruise; Nyong’o isn’t Simon Pegg; and so on. There’s not a great deal of emotion to be found either. The only one who feels properly human is Cruz, and her character is a psychiatrist, unfortunately entangled in the operation, rather than a field agent. The others feel more like high-functioning AIs, programmed to do their jobs.

The action scenes, however, are thoroughly professional and well-staged. There are some early chases around Paris which are approaching top tier, and plenty of bullet-spraying action for the finale. Though Chris has asked me to inform you that, if you have a hand-to-hand fight on a balcony, the rules of action cinema require someone to go over the edge. She was disappointed by the wilful disregard to tradition shown here. In general though, this was acceptable entertainment, and outside of a couple of sentences of dialogue, did not seem obviously preachy. That title, however: painfully obscure, and not explained until far too late. Still, this likely did not deserve the dismal box-office fate which it suffered. Perhaps the audience’s refusal to buy tickets to see it was, in some sense, a political act?

Dir: Simon Kinberg
Star: Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o