Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
The multiverse concept has caught a substantial amount of popularity lately thanks to a studio that keeps finding astonishingly abominable ways to force inclusion for their stories and lowering overall cinematic quality. Yeoh has always been dynamite on screen along with his mentor Jackie Chan (his, or her, what's the difference anyway, they use only one term in China), yet never losing her notable acting trademarks which are undeniably multi-faceted.
The Kwan/Scheinert duo did something unusually good for a blockbuster, and this is the quality level I’d love blockbusters to be flexing on at the least given their abundant mass production, be it never-ending franchises, reboots, remakes, “origin” stories, or just experimental exercises (one can just dream about it). The film does not fully exploit its multiverse concept as much as I wish (I still demand a sequence in the animated world, since Raimi never delivered either), but the interactions are beyond fun, and the episodic structure never loses sight from the focal point: family dynamics. It never takes itself seriously and that is what makes the humor work so well, the action choreography be much more fluent than the average output, the multiverse traversing interactions coherent and wacky, and the mother-and-daughter dynamics work stupendous. Rare is the blockbuster that combines action, comedy, fantasy and drama to representative levels that work as a cohesive whole, so I have zero problems with receiving this kind of quality often.
It is certainly too far from being one of the best narrative films of all time, but this is a testament that originality has never mattered more than execution and delivery, including the intrinsic artistic merit (remember the godawful film The One [2001] with Jet Li? Exactly.)
Also, were only 9 people involved in the VFX, counting 2 directors and 5 main VFX artists at the core that were friends between each other watching free online tutorials? I suppose that certainly makes the expensive official major in VFX completely worthless. Respect to them! Here are their names:
-Benjamin Brewer (lead)
-Ethan Feldbau (lead)
-Jeff Desom
-Evan Halleck
-Kirsten Lepore
-Zak Stoltz
-Matthew Wauhkonen
83/100
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