Ian Callender

Quick note: I'm not a movie critic or even avid movie watcher. This is a rare occurrence of simply feeling compelled just to speak against the waves of absolutely undeserved praise this got. Pros - the visual effects/animations/transitions/tech stuff are all good. The people doing all that/editing/production clearly worked hard and the cast with them to make it happen. It's shot well and at least outwardly looks like they nailed the idea they were going for. Cons - The rest of it. For the quick readers: Just don't bother. It is not worth dragging through hours of confusion and boredom for the "love everybody as they are and make something for yourself" message you can find presented better in other movies or media. This movie, in my opinion, deserves 0% of the recognition or awards it recieved. So here's why I hate it, The plot is simple: Mom struggles with family members and their asssociated dramas, her failing business, and her own feeling of failure. Thats pretty much it. Its been done before, and this take on it feels surface level - only serving to barely string together the movie's events. It doesnt go very deep. This could make a short film, like 10 to 20 minutes would do the trick. And thats about as much time as this movie spends actually dealing with it anyway. Otherwise there are some multiverse travelers and various antagonists that pop up throughout, and some form of a "you're the chosen one and we need to defeat this evil" type of plot is vaguely touched on.. but never explained fully or presented in any way that makes sense. The core multiverse theory for the movie is kinda laid out (jump to another you, now you can use their talents), but afterwards i was pretty much constantly asking "when was THAT explained?" Or "Why are they able to do that? Do they just get superpowers now?" The multiverse stuff is extremely hard to follow and it's not helped by the actual video content of this. All the plot points and the story feel rushed and lazy, secondary to the "spectacle" of the movie itself I guess. Which brings me to what you end up actually watching.. most of the movie is simply a compilation of fight scenes and violence, lazy jokes, sarcasm, yelling, immature prop comedy, shock value moments, and VFX all very loosely "tied together" with its "plot." You dont get an end goal or objective until almost 2 hours in, and all it is is "mom's gotta reconnect a little".. so what the characters are actually doing the whole time is for...? I dont really know. Characters appear/disappear with no rhyme or reason, locations change constantly and the traveling between them get explained less and less as it goes on. It'll stop the chaos to make you feel like the story is finally going somewhere and wrapping up.. and then go back to fights and universe jumping some more. The movie does this like 4 times, at one point even showing end credits before zooming out to reveal now it's set in a movie theater and there's more to sit through. After two hours of it I still felt like I was waiting for the movie to start, like this has all been setting up for background for something.. but what? I don't know. This movie isn't intellectual or high brow or smart. This movie is somebody's extremely lazy attempt at making something intellectual and high brow and smart. The idea could have been cool but they did 0% of the legwork required to make it understandable and/or entertaining for the viewer. It's confusing, frustrating, and boring as hell to watch.