It’s My Time review – Michelle Yeoh excels in Rocky-style quest to be Rubik’s Cube champ

It’s not quite up there with Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver to get into character, but Michelle Yeoh reportedly spent two years learning the Rubik’s Cube to prepare for this Chinese drama in which she plays a real-life former maths teacher who became a champion in retirement. The true story is stretched and squeezed here, fictionalised to fit sports-movie formula; it ends up being so-so entertaining and funny in places, but disappointingly predictable. The biggest surprise is that cubing is so popular it has its own world championship.

Still, Yeoh gives a superb, spiky performance as blunt, foul-tempered Zhao Yanhong; following a stroke, Zhao is living in a nursing home where she is the resident badass, assaulting her robot care companion and making illicit trips to the off-licence. She discovers her natural talent for the Rubik’s Cube when a washed-up ex-champion called Wu Youwei (Haoran Liu) comes to the nursing home to give a tutorial. What follows is a classic sports-film structure, with qualifying heats and Zhao training day and night, lifting weights and pounding the city streets. (Yes, running is de rigueur in a Rubik’s Cube movie; physical strength is Zhao’s weak spot says Wu, who agrees to be her coach.)

Yeoh is enjoyably irascible as Zhao, who goes viral after thrashing a kid in her first competition. Her online fans call her “Grandma Zhao” and the film gently chips away at stereotypes of the older generation; fans assume Zhao is a cuddly elder, while younger cubers underestimate her skill and stamina. Yeoh brings intelligence to the role, but it’s odd that after making Zhao so testy and short-tempered, the film is all soft edges with a squishy centre. Next, can we expect a biopic of the six-year-old Chinese girl who recently set a Rubik’s Cube world record, solving it in just over four seconds?