‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: Chaos Reigns – and So Does Michelle Yeoh – in Unhinged Metaverse Movie

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticWay back in 1998, before Marvel made metaverses a household concept, Gwyneth Paltrow starred in a lovely parallel-realities drama called “Sliding Doors,” in which a woman’s life split along two paths, depending on whether or not her character caught a specific train.

At the time, juggling these competing fates was considered to be so demanding that the filmmakers obliged one of the two Gwyneths to get a haircut, so audiences could tell them apart.Nearly a quarter-century later, our collective cine-literacy has gotten so sophisticated that “Sliding Doors” seems no more challenging than a simple game of tic-tac-toe.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean audiences can handle the gnarly three-dimensional sudoku puzzle that is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mile-a-minute mind-bender from absurdist duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — aka the Daniels — that argues every conceivable variation of our lives exists in some alternate universe or other, then proceeds to give its harried heroine (Michelle Yeoh) a whirlwind tour of all those possibilities.

Produced by comrades in maximalism the Russo brothers, the result is a mess, but a meticulously planned and executed mess, where every shot, every sound effect and every sight gag fits exactly as the Daniels intended into this dense and cacophonous eyesore, which endeavors to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice (an idea Jaco Van Dormael’s “Mr.