Everything Everywhere All At Once review - Random, far too long and totally bonkers

Everything Everywhere All At Once, (15), (139 painfully long minutes), Cineworld Cinemas.
Everything Everywhere All at OnceEverything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once

If you had hot dogs for fingers, there would come a point where you would be really good at using your feet instead.

Apparently.

Oh and in a world where nothing much ever makes such, the best we can all do is simply to be kind.

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Profound? Or nonsense? Probably both – but with the emphasis firmly on the nonsense.

At a painful 139 mins in length, Everything Everywhere All At Once really does live up to its name throwing at you everything everywhere all at once in the most bonkers descent into total randonmness you will ever experience in a cinema.

And that, you have to conclude, is partly the point of it. As one characters suggests, in a world of infinite possibilities, every possibility gets swept away by a world of infinite possibilities.

The starting point is an exhausted Chinese American woman Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes; she lives above the failing laundromat she runs; there’s aggro with her elderly dad; and her daughter has just brought home her girlfriend, certainly not something her elderly dad is going to be happy about.

To be avoided....To be avoided....
To be avoided....
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But clearly things could be worse – as she is just about to find out.

On the way back from a difficult meeting with tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), something rather strange happens in the lift – and suddenly she is experiencing all the versions of herself she’d never managed to make happen.

She’d long dreamt of other lives and longed for them, but now they hit her all at once in a nightmarish profusion of… well, frankly nonsense.

Some of the imagery is striking. A lot of it, in fact.

You can’t unsee the security guard who deliberately, trouserless, leaps bottom first onto a pointed trophy and with said trophy forcibly inserted proceeds to fight Evelyn alongside someone else who has done similar.

The bullet that becomes a googly eye lives with you.

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And the chef with a singing raccoon on his head has certainly got something about it.

But for the most part, by showing so graphically the sheer randomness of all possibilities, Everything Everywhere All At Once becomes one of the dullest films you’ll ever sit through.

The first person left after about 20 minutes, the next a quarter of an hour later, rats leaving the sinking film just leaving us die-hards to wish they were doing Anything Anywhere Somewhere Else.

In the end, the film really gets annoying – simply because in the final ten minutes you suspect it is actually saying something really quite interesting.

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But it’s an awfully long, completely random road to get there.

Invention is all fine and good.

But when it simply becomes bewildering, it quickly also becomes tedious, and after that there is very little way back, especially for a film with such an absurdly long running time.