From left, Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All At Once (A24)

Everything Everywhere All at Once abounds with sight gags and comedic setups planted here and there that come into play later. So, on one hand, the script by the directing team that goes by the name of Daniels—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—feels structured, thought out, and purposeful. Yet for long stretches of time, this fight-fest of a film feels loosey-goosey, as though the directors are flying by the seat of their pants at the speed of sound. Anything goes here. The filmmaking is both disciplined and unruly. For viewers not familiar with the directors’ films (Swiss Army Man, The Death of Dick Long), they may need more than one energy drink to keep up. 

The story is similar to a dense dystopian novel, a doorstop thick with convoluted subplots. The directors similarly go on and on, stretching the running time to 140 minutes. Before the plot becomes bewilderingly complicated, the initial setup is the most lucid part of the packed narrative, but viewers should resist the temptation to make complete sense of the dense multiversal world-building and just let the images and onscreen kinetic energy hit them over the head. They also need to buckle in for the fight scenes. All types of weaponry come into play: fanny packs, an adorable Pomeranian, and double-headed dildoes.

The first 20 minutes or so form a somewhat conventional narrative: a fast-paced, screwball comedy of a Chinese American family getting ready to throw a birthday party. But first, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, a ball of energy) have to undergo an arduous audit at the local Internal Revenue Service. Amid all the mounds of receipts in the office above their failing laundromat in Los Angeles’s Simi Valley, Evelyn stumbles upon divorce papers instigated by Waymond. But there’s too much to do before she can confront him: their adult daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), arrives to help with the party, bringing along her girlfriend and throwing Evelyn for a loop: What to tell Joy’s grandpa, Evelyn’s rigid and conservative father (James Hong), who has always opposed Evelyn’s marriage to Waymond?

At the local IRS office, Waymond starts acting strange during the audit conducted by the thorough Deirdre, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who fully embraces her scene-stealing character-actor role, dressed in mustard yellow and sporting the most unflattering Dutch boy haircut. Under his breathe, he gives Evelyn a list of bizarre instructions, emphatically telling her, with his voice getting higher, that he’s not her husband but someone from the Alphaverse who needs her help to bring back balance to the universe—talk about a vague and humongous mission. Now she says to herself, “I should have listened to my father.” 

Apparently, countless parallel universes exist side by side, in all lives other versions of Evelyn, or maybe her doppelgängers, and the Evelyn of Simi Valley now has access to their wide-ranging skills. One alternate Evelyn includes a glamourous star of Hong Kong cinema, in a meta nod to Yeoh’s own career. Another Evelyn, a befuddled chef at a Japanese steak house, chops alongside a young cook tutored in the art of fine dining by a critter hiding under his chef’s hat in a wicked takeoff of a certain Pixar film about a chatty rodent. The filmmakers intentionally clutter the story lines, hopping from one universe to the next. In short, the movie’s title kind of says it all. 

The scenario runs on its own peculiar logic. Because Evelyn has failed at everything else in life, the powers that be have determined she now has to excel at something, but Evelyn has little choice in what. She either has to fight or become roadkill when the IRS building becomes a fiery battlefield right out of Die Hard invaded by the dark side. Casting her as the last line of defense in this hi-octane showdown, the Daniels have given Yeoh plenty of opportunities to flex her marital arts skills once again, not to mention her comedic chops. 

With its cartoonishly fast-motion and gravity-defying fight scenes, the movie owes a huge debt to Looney Tunes cartoons, as if directed by Frank Tashlin and fueled by frat-boy humor. The movie is bound to confuse, but it’s not meant as a puzzle to solve, but rather to experience.