I’m still going to the cinema probably less often than I should but I really wanted to give this film a boost if I could. The trailer for this immediately grabbed my attention when it first popped up and the excellent reviews only cemented the deal. While multiverse stories are kind of the in-thing in science-fiction films right now, I loved how this was simultaneously both a very big and a very small film. I’ve never watched anything by new directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, credited collectively as Daniels, before and they sure seem like a team to pay attention to.

Between her usual duties at the laundromat she owns, needing to please her father who has just arrived in the US from China to visit her, and being audited by the IRS, Evelyn Wang is having a very bad day. It gets worse when her daughter Joy wants to introduce her long-time girlfriend to her grandfather which Evelyn is reluctant to do due to his conservatism and her own husband Waymond wants to divorce her as the romance has gone out of their relationship. Then at the IRS office, Waymond is seemingly possessed by another person. He calls himself the Waymond from another multiverse, the Alpha Verse, where they have invented the technology of verse-jumping which allows them to access the skills, memories and body characteristics of their parallel universe selves. Their experiments however led to the creation of Jobu Tupaki, an entity who is able to access all parallel selves at once, and poses a danger to the entire multiverse. He thinks that she, this particular version of Evelyn, has the potential to stop Jobu Tupaki and gives her access to this verse-jumping technology, though to unlock particular selves, she needs to do weird, improbable actions. In this way, she is able to unlock other selves include versions of herself who never married Waymond and went on to become an action movie star, a chef or even a different type of human from a completely different reality.

This is indeed as crazy and over-the-top film as you might expect, perhaps even more so what with the sausage hands and jumping on a butt-plug gags. But as my wife notes this is actually a very coherent and easy to understand film even with the crazy sci-fi concepts being thrown around. This is because as insane as the multiverse antics are, this is at heart a story about everyday family conflicts with a small set of characters. Despite esoteric stuff like the black bagel being a symbol of nihilism, the conflicts and values in this film are ordinary ones with an Asian character, which is what gives it a solid, emotional core. I feel that this is a bit of a bait and switch as Jobu Tupaki isn’t really a threat to the multiverse as she is talked up to be at first and wanting to destroy everyone and everything because your mother didn’t understand you is quite a stretch. But this is first and foremost a comedic action film so this level of personal drama and character development is certainly good enough. I do really appreciate how it takes traditional Asian values and Americanizes and updates them in a way that respects everyone involved.

The action choreography is solid as expected but mainly it aims at being over-the-top and entertainingly silly. So we get all kinds of objects used as impromptu weapons and an endless series of references to martial arts tropes from other media. In addition to the more easily recognized ones like the bullet-stopping scene from The Matrix, there are also tons of references to older Chinese media, such as training a super powerful kung fu finger or learning to fight blind by being a blind opera singer. Then there are the plain silly stuff like the raccoon version of Ratatouille and perhaps even the post-apocalyptic Mad Max nature of the Alpha-verse. It’s pure unbridled creativity and actually really funny too so I’m all for it. I do note that while the production is executed competently, this is a film with a rather cheap budget relatively speaking. That’s why almost the entire film is set within either the laundromat or the IRS office. This contributes to the film feeling rather small in scale even as it purports to encompass the multiverse.

Needless to say I’m pleased as punch that a film like this exists and enjoyed it wholeheartedly. This is really reminiscent of something that an American Stephen Chow might have made in his prime. Of course it can’t be considered as a serious film but I do like that the bagel thing is a way of poking fun at fashionable youth flirtation with nihilism. As a final note, it’s fun to see Ke Huy Quan return to acting but this film does once again prove that the US needs to broaden their base of ethnic Asian performers. It’s the just the same faces over and over again and that gets a bit tiresome.