Escape from the 21st Century (2025) Movie Review: An endlessly creative and breathlessly wild genre mash-up

If “Everything Everywhere all at Once” did not exist, “Escape for the 21st Century” would be the single most profound and zappy thing out here that tells us that, even if we spaced-out through time itself, our conclusion will be the same – we are all small little kids, whishing to stay the same even when we grow up. Chinese filmmaker Yang Li’s debut film is at once endlessly creative and breathlessly wild, but also overtly silly and indulgent – which is perfectly in sync with the rhythm the filmmaker is going for.

It all starts in 1999 when the world is about to hit the millennium. Teenage boys Wang Zha, Chengyong and Pao Pao live in a place that feels like earth but the days are only 12 hour long. Matching that fast-forwardness of time is director Li’s incredible visual style – things are either cut like a razor’s edge or boldly pulled across the weirdest choice of aspect ratio into comic-book-like effects. Special effects are used in abundance, and you will find yourself wrapped in the movie’s colorful haze – much like the toxic chemicals the trio fall into after a local brawl goes southways. The three of them are able to somehow come out of it alive, but they also discover that they can now jump 20 years into the future every time one of them sneezes.

And of course, what they see in the future, or their future self to be specific, is not particularly charming. The ‘grown-up’ versions of the three of them have messed up lives – Chengyong is now a bad guy who is involved in a rampant organ trafficking business. Wang Zha a photo journalist whose fate is somehow interlinked with the aforementioned business and a badass colleague who has to put in earplugs while kicking bad men who are doing bad men stuff. Pao Pao is now jacked; all thanks to the consistent bullying he has had to face in his teenage years, but even his future is somehow linked to that of Chengyong’s.

A still from Escape from the 21st Century (2025).

Now, the three of them have to constantly move through the two timelines, shot in airlined goofiness, only to understand that growing up is harder than they could have ever imagined. Director Yang Li takes on every single play in the book and either twists it around completely, intermixes it, or tweaks it just enough to make it sound child-like and look uber-cool. Beyond the visual inventiveness, he is also eager to play with the idea of how comedy is perceived. The way he mixes the elongation of physical comedy with the idea of existentialism is groundbreaking, albeit repetitive at times.

The third act in particular gets extremely exhausting and tiresome, almost feeling like the filmmaker has run out of ideas because he was so busy giving us a tonal whiplash that he forgot how to evenly lead us to the finish line. That said, with so much overstuffiness in the narrative itself, the message that Yang Li wants to send across is able to seep through nonetheless. All of us are anxious about what the future holds. But instead of truly understanding ourselves, we often just wait for the wrecking ball to hit us in the face. With “Escape from the 21st Century”, we get another look at how small we are in this world and how little we have any control over it. However, it is not all that dreadful in the end, because along the way, we have people who make it whole, and experiences that feel straight out of science fiction.