I'd heard extremely high praise for this film over the last six months or so, which may have raised my expectations a little too high. Don't get me wrong, this is a wild, imaginative ride with some excellent performances and stunning visual effects, but it's not as clever as people kept making it out to be. It takes that one scene from The Matrix where Neo downloads all of martial arts and then quips about it ("I know kung fu!") and turns that into a quirky black comedy with touches of Marvel superhero films. That's a fun concept, and they play it out nicely, but it's not entirely life-changing.

The film does execute this central premise to perfection, though. I mean, not a single step wrong for the entire run time, in terms of that core idea. Everything from the psychopathic version of the daughter that has effectively become a kind of reality hacker, to the wonderful sequence where they are both just rocks in a desert, to the tack-sharp humour as our main character downloads some random skill and manages to make it work, the whole thing is ridiculously sublime. But it does lean on the ridiculous a little too much, without ever feeling the earned. The grotesque hot dog fingers, or the raccoon/Ratatouille recurring joke, they're good ideas to consider a universe of infinite possibilities, but they feel more like the bad gags in Rick and Morty "clip show" episodes; they're just a bit banal and stupid for stupid's sake, rather than actually being clever. (I mean, the raccoon joke would have been clever had it been a two-punch gag, once with the misconception linguistics joke, and once with the unexpected alt-reality reveal, but they double-down on it way too hard; in fact, I think you could say that about both of them).

It's also a little unclear in the messaging. I get that this is a movie about the exhaustion of mid-to-late life crises; the feeling that time is running out and you have nothing to show for it. And it's also a film about how communication is important and that relationships don't work if one-half of them aren't interested in putting in the work. But that message builds in a way that makes me strongly dislike our main character, whilst also trying to make her journey somehow feel vindicating? I'm not rooting for the homophobic, self-obsessed woman who refuses to listen to anyone around her. Maybe the film isn't made for me, and that's completely fine (probably about time, to be honest), so maybe I'm missing a broader point here, but either way it didn't quite hit right.

On the other hand, Michelle Yeoh plays her role incredibly and her husband, played by Ke Huy Quan, was hugely entertaining (in fact, as I said above, the acting here is top-notch throughout); the action sequences are beautifully crafted; the visual effects are hugely entertaining and constantly surprise; the pacing is perfect throughout; and the direction is almost flawless. I also loved how they consistently one-up their own surprises and keep you guessing how much of this is actually happening versus just Evelyn not coping with reality. In particular, both the grandfather's sudden upgrade to a battle-weary Professor X analogue and the daughter's first main "fight" sequence were great. I did also like the twist ending about her daughter's abject depression and Evelyn's use of love and acceptance as a winning tactic (even if her real-world actions didn't overly make me believe she had really understood that message fully). There's a huge amount to love about this movie, but it just didn't quite all pull together as much as I had hoped. It's great, but it isn't phenomenal.