Once upon the year 1999, on a planet very much like our own — only 3,000 light years away — three teenagers find themselves plunging into chemical waste that imbues them with a unique ability: when they sneeze their consciousness travels 20 years into the future. With their sinuses now propelling them to and fro in time, they are burdened with two precepts: the future sucks, and they have power to change it. From this punchy absurdist conceit embarks an imaginative adventure, which recalls the high-wire genre acrobatics of a Tsui Hark or Stephen Chow extravaganza, further cross pollinated with post-modern maximalist comedies like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Writer-director Yang Li maintains a breakneck momentum as he thrusts his three adolescent travellers into a disorienting manhood. The trio’s leader, Cheng Yong Wang (Yang Song), discovers he is subservient to a criminal empire; Zha Wang (Ruoyun Zhang) struggles as a journalist for a corrupt media company; and Pao Pao (Chenhao Li) threatens the integrity of their friendship upon learning that he is dating Yi Yang (Yanmanzi Zhu), the girl of Cheng Yong’s dreams. Featuring a dizzying array of special effects, and kinetic action that brilliantly integrates comic-book animation with magnificent martial art prowess from the scene stealing Chuxi Zhong and Xiaoliang Wu — not to mention sublime needle drops that hit like an aural dose of epinephrine — Escape from the 21st Century is a transcendent treatise on the power of friendship, the elasticity of fate, and the dream of building a better world.

PETER KUPLOWKSKY

Content advisory: strobing/strobing effects, accident trauma, violence