As much as busy mom and business owner Evelyn Wang tries to be the master of her domain, things are crumbling around her. She’s being audited by the IRS, her elderly, judgmental father is visiting from China, her meek husband isn’t happy, and her gay daughter is aggressively pushing away because traditional Evelyn doesn’t get her. This seems like a difficult but typical set of problems. And here’s where it gets complicated. According to a messenger from another realm, to combat these problems and also save multiple universes, she must learn Kung Fu and a variety of other skills from her other parallel lives to battle the creeps who prevent her from… connecting with her daughter. Do I have that right?
It’s a fantastic explosion of creativity. To watch it is a crazy experience, with a barrage of ideas, impossible to process all at once. But Kung Fu isn’t just Kung Fu. It’s a metaphor for battling your own demons and prejudices, and the courage to leap into other parts of your psyche to get to the core of who you wanted to be versus who you are. In her lifetime, Michelle Yeoh could not have asked for a better role. The rest of the cast is great, too, including a terrific, juicy part for Hollywood treasure James Hong and the welcome return of Ke Huy Quan. To write about this movie is to undermine it -- it’s so full of emotion and surprises.
I love movies like this, made by people who love movies for people who love movies, that achieve great Kung Fu leaps in the art of storytelling, entertaining, and also pushing the limits of the imagination. The big, big, big point is: it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t fun.
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