You have so many goals you never finished, dreams you never followed. You’re living your worst you . . . Most people only have a few significant alternate life paths so close to them. But you, here, you’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything.
So, man, how does one even talk about this movie? To try to explain this movie to someone who knows nothing about it is to appear to be an absolute madman. But it’s hard to find a way into the movie even when you just want to have a conversation about it with people who have seen it. Regardless, spoilers aplenty ahead because I do want to talk about the movie.
It’s a multiverse movie, of course, in which a seemingly ordinary person from our reality discovers a threat that will destroy the entire multiverse and she must step forward to prevent the cataclysm. That sounds pretty much like a super-hero movie and this is definitely an epic, eye-popping adventure and a fast & furious action film. But it’s also a deeply character driven film, a melancholy musing on generational rifts, a raucous and hilarious comedy and, just for good measure, an ultimately hopeful paean to the power of love and kindness.
The cast is really off-the-charts amazing here. Michelle Yeoh, just commanding the screen with a charismatic and compelling performance, is radiant here in a role that allows her to stretch her acting muscles in everything from real pathos to broad comedy and then come back around to being an action hero, just like the old days. Ke Huy Quan is a revelation as Yeoh’s husband; like her, he’s tasked with playing several versions of his character and he pulls everything off to perfection. Stephanie Hsu gives the best supporting performance as Michelle Yeoh’s troubled daughter in this reality; a version of her from another reality turns out to be the multiverse-threatening villain, a force of nihilism that has been broken by seeing too much of the multiverse. I think Hsu should have won the Oscar instead of Jamie Lee Curtis, but Curtis is also downright fantastic; I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw her this invested in a role and she manages to pull off both a grotesque caricature of a comedic character and then show us the humanity behind that. James Hong & Jenny Slate are both also very good in their supporting roles.
The film explores its ideas with both real verve and some actual nuance. I found Yeoh’s Evelyn and Hsu’s Joy/Jobu to be absolutely compelling characters, compelling taken on their own merits and compelling in relationship with each other. Central to the film is the question of nihilism and how to deal with the kind of existential dread we often find ourselves facing in the modern world. Some may find the ultimate resolution, that we must be kind and cling to those we love, to be trite; well, I suppose the sentiment is trite, but I personally found the film to somehow pull it off and I was genuinely moved by the final moments of the film, deeply moved in fact. As someone who has dealt with mental and emotional disorders in the past, I found the depiction of depression and nihilism to ring incredibly true to me. Jobu Tapaki’s repeated mantra is that “nothing matters,” and, not to get too personal, that was a phrase that recurred a lot in my own life during my deepest period of depression and suicidal ideation. I loved the way the movie turned that existentially bleak phrase on its head and discovered freedom inside, a freedom to be the best people we can be, to choose to love and be kind in every moment and to focus on the here and now. I found the final shot of the film to be really powerful; in an age of constant distraction, and in a film that is itself a real jumble of near overwhelming sprawl, it’s a reminder that we can be focused on something, on the important things that are right in front of us, the things that are important because we choose them to be and choose to live in them.
All of this makes the film sound very highfalutin and, yeah, it kind of is. But it’s also a movie dedicated to being as crazily entertaining and weird as any you’ve ever seen and it gets pretty close in a lot of ways. Some of the fight scenes are great and a lot of the humor lands. One of the “rules” of the multiverse here is that as the multiverses get “closer,” you can connect to people in the other multiverses specifically by doing nonsensical things and, yeah, that’s pretty convenient. Daniels really had to be slapping each other on the back when they came up with that idea. But it does lend itself to some incredibly memorable moments and imagery; the multiverse hopping in general does that and I found myself constantly getting surprised by the movie and where it was going. Also, since I just said imagery, this is probably the right time to mention the amazing costumes. This is really a fantastically creative film in just about every technical way.
Back to the writing, there’s a throwaway gag wherein we find out that the trophies given to outstanding IRS agents resembles a giant butt-plug. Okay, that’s funny. In any other movie, that’s the joke. Here, we get an entire action sequence revolving around people all fighting to get the trophy specifically in order to shove it up their butt and, by virtue of that being nonsensical, gaining power from their otherselves throughout the multiverse. We then get an entire fight scene where one of the participants just, you know, has the trophy jammed up his butt and hanging out. I am, by the way, usually the guy who says don’t censor things because the humor is often in the shock value; in this case, however, I support the use of pixelation in this scene because, for whatever reason, it makes the scene way funnier than if the guy was just hanging dong the whole time. It’s genuinely funnier. I’m not even going to go over the whole Raccaccoonie thing, but it’s a similar bit of absolute madness in that I laughed and thought it was a very funny one-time joke that would never be referenced again that they then turned into an entire subplot that the film probably spends ten or fifteen minutes on.
Okay, so, if you force me to quibble, there were some multiverse bits that I felt didn’t necessarily work. I mean, I’m not sure why having hot dog fingers would lead a person to regurgitate ketchup and mustard while kissing. I’m just not clear on the biology there. Or just existentially. Like are ketchup and mustard even linked with hot dogs in that world? I’m assuming they don’t eat hot dogs so why would their bodies know to produce ketchup and mustard? The fact that I’m even asking these questions feels like it means the movie wins and I’m prepared to let it win, because, end of the day, it’s just a knock-out movie that held my interest for nearly two-and-a-half hours. It often seems to me that one of the worst things a movie can do is fail to nail its tonal shifts; we can all name movies that have failed in that way and have been overall sunk by it. This movie sets itself an absolutely absurd array of tones to play with and I think it’s unbelievably sure-footed. Sometimes it wants to flit between surrealist comedy and heartfelt sadness in the space of a single montage and it nails basically every time.
Anyway, this is a must watch in my opinion and a near perfect film. It’s cinema as a high-wire act and I’m gratified that it was embraced by audiences as much as it was. I’ve always asserted that the average movie-goer is down for movies to be much weirder than studios seem to believe and here’s a little evidence in favor of that thesis. It’s just quite a movie. 4 stars.
tl;dr – genre-hopping epic is heartfelt, melancholy, hilarious, thrilling, thought-provoking & incredibly emotionally cathartic; gripping film boasts brilliant performances & eye-popping visuals. 4 stars.