Michelle Yeoh Spent Two Years Learning the Rubik's Cube for a Sports-Movie Formula

Michelle Yeoh reportedly spent two years learning the Rubik's Cube. She did it to play a real-life former maths teacher who became a puzzle champion in retirement, in the Chinese drama It's My Time.

The film tells a true story. Yet, as critics have noted, it is stretched and squeezed, fictionalised to fit the sports-movie formula. The result is described as so-so entertaining and funny in places, but disappointingly predictable. The biggest surprise, one review suggests, is that cubing is so popular it has its own world championship.

Yeoh's performance stands above the material. She is superb and spiky as Zhao Yanhong, a blunt, foul-tempered woman living in a nursing home after a stroke. Zhao rules the place as its resident badass. She assaults her robot care companion. She makes illicit trips to the off-licence.

Her talent emerges by accident. A washed-up ex-champion called Wu Youwei, played by Haoran Liu, visits the nursing home to give a cubing tutorial. Zhao discovers a natural gift for the puzzle. What follows is a classic sports-film structure: qualifying heats, training day and night, lifting weights, pounding the city streets.

Yes, the running is there. Physical strength is Zhao's weak spot, says Wu, who agrees to become her coach. The Rocky parallels are deliberate and unapologetic. (The dedication recalls Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for The Revenant, though two years of cubing is admittedly a milder method.)

What does this change for Yeoh?

It confirms a late-career pattern. Since her Oscar, Yeoh has taken roles that test her range rather than rest on it. Here she plays a stroke survivor in a Mandarin-language drama, cranky and defiant, far from the polish of her Hollywood work. The performance earns praise the film around it does not.

A formula in want of a story

The trouble is structural. A retirement-home underdog with a hidden talent is sturdy material. But the film, reviewers argue, bends the facts to hit every familiar beat: the reluctant coach, the montage, the big heat. The real Zhao Yanhong's story needed less invention, not more.

The comedy lands in places. Yeoh's timing carries scenes that the script alone would flatten. Liu, as the defeated mentor finding purpose, gives her a genuine foil.

What does this change for the genre? Nothing, and that is the verdict. It's My Time joins the long shelf of agreeable, forgettable sports dramas. The difference is its star. One performer spent two years on a cube so the film could spend ninety minutes on a formula. Audients will remember her, not it.

Whether Yeoh's next project gives that discipline better material will decide if this was a detour or a direction.