What kind of movie *is* this?
Well, it combines a wide variety of genres: I’d say it’s sci-fi, martial arts, midlife crisis, coming-of-age, multicultural, LGBT, and dramedy—also, according to Wikipedia, it has elements of absurdism, surrealism, animation, and fantasy. Some of the humor is too deliberately gross, sexual, or absurd for my taste, but perhaps that’s inevitable, given how many styles are mixed together.
Kind of like Free Guy (2021), it was a creative, entertaining, meaningful, optimistic synthesis of many things I’d seen before. There’s a TV Tropes page on it that, well, lists the tropes it uses; and it’s lonnnnng….
Maybe what the movie reminded me of most (since arguably the movie’s salient aspect is zaniness) is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), especially the effects of the improbability drive (“Ford, I think I’m a sofa!”). Oh, and actually also Spies in Disguise (2019), which features defensive “weapons” that defuse violence instead of perpetuating it. And then there’s the idea, also found in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), that humans can’t absorb all the information in the universe without ceasing to be human.
The “themes” chunk of the Wikipedia article is worth reading. TLDR? It says the movie urges us to resist nihilism. In the end, something matters. That’s what overwhelmed Chinese immigrant Evelyn has to learn—but she’s in the middle of an IRS audit of her laundromat, a divorce, and a fight with her distant, angsty, overweight, tattooed, lesbian daughter about whether to tell grandpa she’s a lesbian. She’s mediocre at everything. How can she be expected to save the multiverse?!
