Whatever you might think about it, that The Flash actually made it to the screen is a miracle. This is a movie that has been in some stage of development for almost a decade, going through numerous rewrites and re-orientations as the DC universe landscape around it shifted. As some have pointed out a whole Flash TV series debuted on the CW, ran for nine seasons and ended in the time that this movie has been somewhere along the pipeline. After cycling through several directors and creative visions, delaying pre-production and the scope of the project, Warner Bros. landed on It’s Andy Muschietti. And while the production process apparently went smoothly, the movie then had to be delayed more times due to a P.R. crisis last year surrounding the erratic, disturbing, and illegal behaviour of star Ezra Miller. Many have argued the movie shouldn’t have been released at all on account of this (especially compared to what happened to that Batgirl movie). But the upper brass at DC and Warner Bros. remained adamant of its importance. So after all of that time and drama and attempts at hype over its immense gravity and quality, The Flash is finally here, is under-performing, and is mostly awful.
It would honestly have been a big surprise if it wasn’t, given all of these circumstances and the diminishing popularity of both its star and the universe they belonged to. Hell, when one of the apparent appeals of this movie is wiping the slate it comes from clean, that’s not a good sign. And it even furthers that notion that the superhero multiverse concept outside of the Spider-Verse movies (and Across the Spider-Verse is playing opposite The Flash right now to hammer home the point) is fundamentally shallow and uninteresting -unable to offer anything beyond hollow nostalgia fan service. And god, does this movie ever beat that dead horse!
However, one assumption by the marketing that doesn’t prove true is that the Flash is ultimately a side character in his own movie. The actual fact is the opposite: the Flash is certainly the main character, but it is not his movie. The plot concerns Miller’s socially awkward Barry Allen, a junior member of the Justice League, discovering his powers can make him go back in time and using this to prevent the death of his mother when he was a child. But in doing so he creates an alternate timeline, where it’s version of himself has not yet become the Flash, Batman (Michael Keaton, reprising his role from two Tim Burton films thirty years ago) is older and retired, Superman doesn’t seem to exist, and General Zod (Michael Shannon) is about to invade and terraform the Earth.
Other than the exceptional world-threatening stakes, it’s a premise that reads remarkably similar to the Back to the Future series -which the film clumsily lampshades several times in the form of a joke that nobody but cinephiles will get. And that seems to be the general tenor the movie is going for, at least in its first half. The script by Christina Hodson of Bumblebee and Birds of Prey bounces between a playful goofiness in the time travel shenanigans and interactions between the two Barrys -the elder of whom ends up tasked with training the younger, and the heavy action-drama more characteristic of DC movies in this continuity. But the instincts towards the former can be wildly inane, as in an early set-piece where the Flash has to comically rescue a bunch of babies falling out a skyscraper; and to the latter they can be overwrought and dramatically boring. These conflicted energies in tandem don’t make for a particularly compelling or consistent story, which is not nearly as convoluted as feared, but nor is it all that interesting or inspired.
A lot of this does unfortunately come down to the lead character, meant to be our emotional throughline into the movie, but who doesn’t have much of an engaging personality beyond a few generic neurotic tendencies -I’ve seen this character in two movies already and I barely remember a lick about him. The writing doesn’t do a lot for him either, only to show a certain contrasting maturity to the alternate version, who is a cartoonishly dopey teenager. Miller handles the material perfectly adequately, until they are required to broadly emote. There is a forcefulness to their delivery in these circumstances, especially when coming from stoner idiot Barry, that is really unnatural and off-putting. But Miller, to their credit, is at least invested -which can’t be said about Keaton, who after making a career come-back off a movie that satirized an actor trying to escape an iconic superhero role, sinks back into his Batman with little of the charm and mystique that he once imbued in the part. You can practically see him wincing in that Batsuit, having to repeat old famous lines. For his suit, cave, Batmobile, etc. the designs of the old movies are there (and of course Danny Elfman’s musical motif), but without any semblance of the carefully composed gothic tone and aesthetic technique that mode those earlier movies stand out. Elsewhere actors like Maribel Verdú and Kiersey Clemons are wasted, Shannon is simply treading water; only Sasha Calle, playing this universe’s version of Supergirl, is all that impressive -making a powerful entrance that is only diminished by where the movie ultimately decides to go with her.
The central point the movie professes to be about is the importance of letting go -Barry puts multiple universes in danger to circumvent his mother’s death rather than accept and reconcile it. There’s a meta-textual aspect to this in how the movie itself is primed to be a reset of the DC Universe (though if so, it seems a rather mild one). But then while the movie makes these statements, it still is couched in the warmth of nostalgia -whether for Keaton’s Batman, the “Snyderverse”, or other touchstones of DC Comics-to-movies history that have all the grace of Space Jam: A New Legacy. Dwelling on a loss is seen to be catastrophic for Barry personally, in a twist that’s not entirely without ingenuity; yet it comes out of a movie perfectly willing to conjure CGI approximations of deceased actors for no particular reason than aimless fan pandering. As for the thematic arc seemingly seeded within the younger Barry, gradually forced to become the Flash himself and deal with the consequent responsibilities, the movie just lets it slip away once it has fulfilled a particular fan service purpose.
Those CGI corpses are wrong on an ethical level, but they also just look very bad. As do several of the effects in this movie, such as the Flash’s running in place speed bubble and the rubber version of Batman that partakes in all the goofy high-octane fights (one of the charms of those Burton movies was how most of Batman’s stunts felt grounded). There is very little substance to the CGI to give the stakes of the climax much weight -and the villain might as well be paper for how tangible he is. And yet, there are other effects that are actually quite good, or at least bear a distinct comic book aesthetic. When the Flash’s powers are being viewed objectively yet in slow-motion (as occurs a couple times), with gold streaks trailing him, it looks viscerally and distinctly like a comic book panel. And where the movie strives for that kind of iconography, in composition and camerawork, it succeeds just about every time. What helps is that the movie is well-lit and its colours are nicely saturated -even a movie as otherwise bad as this one still looks more eye-catching than your average Marvel movie. But it makes the stuff that drags the movie down hurt all the more.
The Flash is possibly the last superhero with widespread name recognition to get his own movie. And it sucks that it’s not a movie I could for instance, take my dad to -who was a fan of the character growing up. Because this movie doesn’t belong to the character of Barry Allen, even as he is the driver of plot; it belongs to a wider cynical imperative to cash in on nostalgia and cash out on a failed cinematic universe. I think back to the unceremonious axing of Batgirl last fall, and this movie, it’s higher pedigree notwithstanding, cannot possibly be all that better a product. What grains of compelling artistry and ideas it does have are washed out by how poorly the whole thing is strung together -apparently a decade’s development was not enough. Hardly the least of this dreary movie cycle but symbolic of it nonetheless, and of the clueless company apparatus that forced it on us.
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