Thank the heavens this was playing in Joplin this weekend; I was gonna have a small-scale fit if I had to wait for disc or streaming. Michelle Yeoh stars as prickly, stressed-out and very ordinary laundromat owner Evelyn Wang. Her relationships with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Qwan, who you probably remember from TEMPLE OF DOOM and THE GOONIES) and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) are strained, her estranged father (James Hong) is flying in for Chinese New Year, and she’s being audited by the IRS. In the elevator on the way to meet the IRS inspector (an amusingly dowdy and cross Jamie Lee Curtis), Waymond’s body is briefly possessed by an alternate universe counterpart who tells Evelyn that she is the key to stopping the multiverse-threatening nihilist Jobu Tupaki; using tech to access the skills she needs from other potential lifetimes, she finds that she also gets to behold and even inhabit those what-could-have-beens. What follows is an exhilarating, inventive action spectacle filled with bizarre gags, sights you’ve surely never seen before, and a warm, thoughtful core message that I think uses the big ol’ web of branching timelines idea really well. Honestly, at this point I’m just happy to see a multiverse story that isn’t trying to sell me something else or play on my nostalgia, but I’m thrilled to report that it’s also brilliant and bonkers and full of heart, with Qwan in particular being the incredibly charming key to the film’s most emotionally moving moments. Yeoh of course is also terrific throughout; it’s a long road of growth and change she’s given to play, and no step on it is not believable. My dad did offer the fair criticism that it feels long — between widely spaced act titles, digressions that are in-the-moment puzzling, one major fake-out, and a story structure that gives the viewer no familiar landmarks to orient their sense of time through most of the middle stretch, I can definitely see where he’s coming from; I do expect it to play differently in this respect on rewatch. And therein lies the big issue I have with this being in Joplin as opposed to li’l ol’ P-burg — I do rather wish I could go straight back out to give this another go. Highly, highly recommended if it’s in your neck of the woods.
