The Flash and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros. Pictures
Directed by Andy Muschietti
The Flash has been in development since at least Suicide Squad and its journey to the big screen has been fraught, to say the least. Controversy with its main star, the shifting sands of the DCEU project as a whole, Warner Bros getting sold to Discovery, and let’s not forget the Global Pandemic that threw everything into chaos and continue to affect us to this day. On top of all of that, in case there wasn’t enough going against this, it was a movie that frankly few people seemed to ask for as it was borne of the earliest version of the DCEU that people have roundly rejected and that even Warner Bros has started to correct course on. The DCEU may yet have a happy ending now that we’re finally starting over with a new creative vision under James Gunn, but is this last hurrah a bittersweet epithet to everything that it had previously stood for or is it the nail in the coffin that will finally put it all to rest? Let’s find out!!
It’s not easy being a superhero as I’m sure most of them will gladly tell you, but for Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) it comes with an extra dose of sadness as they are the perpetual New Guy of the Justice League. Unlike their teammates who are either God-like figures or super rich, they’re just a person trying to live their life and deal with their tragic backstory which involves their mother being murdered and their dad taking the blame for it. With their father’s last appeal coming fast, Barry is overcome with grief and finds out, much like Superman back in 1978, that angry running is the secret to time travel; giving him a chance to fix what went wrong all those years ago. Sadly for them, however, we’re following Butterfly Effect rules and every change makes things much worse which cascades into more and more problems that he is tasked with fixing which includes a much goofier Barry Allen who needs to learn to take care of himself and an older Batman (Michael Keaton) who gave up the cowl long ago. Oh, and General Zod (Michael Shannon) is about to take over the world since there’s seemingly no Superman in this timeline, and there are very few outcomes I can think of that are worse than having to live through Man of Steel again. Can Barry fix the timeline and perhaps leave the world in a better place than where it was when they started this adventure? Can Barry be a proper mentor to younger Barry and set them on the right course, or will this interference in the timeline create unforeseen ripples for them as well? Is there any way I can go back in time myself and have Warner Bros cancel this instead of the Batgirl movie?
I’ve started wondering if I’ve been too harsh on the DCEU as I’ve given my fair share of harsh reviews while letting some of the lesser Marvel movies skate by with decent scores. Am I simply being as objective as I can when weighing the pros and cons of these movies, or is there some insidious bias within me that is tipping the scales in Marvel’s favor? Thankfully those fears have been quelled as this latest outing from Warner Bros is the best example of a mismanaged superhero movie since Batman v Superman: Death of a Franchise. I’ve definitely seen worse from this studio, but let’s not mince words here; this is a baffling misguided, and mismanaged superhero flick that shines bright in a few key moments and wallows in its pitifulness for the rest of it. Warner Bros has no one to blame but themselves for what has happened here, and yet you almost have to feel sorry for them as it must have been clear years ago that this was going to be a massive failure yet it already so much riding on it that the only option was to power through it and polish this turd with unrelenting vigor. The end result is not without merit, but there’s no escaping how much of a sunk cost this was and how small of an impact it ended up having.
Simply put, this movie is broken; tore up from the floor up. It’s a mishmash of Flash storylines, nostalgic callbacks, and corporate panic that is the culmination of all the DCEU’s problems as everything that just wasn’t working about these movies has come to a head In this long-delayed and barely asked-for mess. If we really drill down and try to find a source for all this movie’s ills, aside from its shoddy special effects which swing wildly between decent and laughable, I’d lay it down to two factors; a terribly written script and terribly written punch-up. The plot is nonsensical in the way that only bad comic book stories can be where canon is king and characters are subservient to the mandates of editorial. DCEU wanted this to be the big shakeup of the franchise and for audiences to eagerly anticipate the radical changes to the status quo, but it all comes off as hollow and completely unfocused with the filmmakers giving fanboys everything they could want in the most uninteresting way possible. That would be bad enough as watching over two hours of tedious franchise management already sounds like the worst possible movie-going experience, but the fact that the version of the DCEU it’s trying to course correct has already been scrapped and is under new management. As a standalone movie, it’s all set up and with no payoff as the conflicts are not so much resolved as they are rearranged, and whatever closure it was expecting future movies to follow through on are almost certainly off the table which gives us even less reason to care about any of it. The filmmakers seem to have realized this and have tried their darnedest to at least make it a fun waste of time, but there was a huge miscalculation as far as Ezra Miller’s performance and the obvious attempts to add wit and humor to their dialogue come off as painfully unfunny and are simply grating to listen to. Miller’s terrible issues are nothing to ignore when reviewing this movie, but even if they were a saint in real life I’d have little to recommend here as they seem completely out of place despite being the star of the movie. I want to tread carefully in my criticism here as there seems to be a deliberate attempt to characterize them as neuro-divergent and if someone finds the performance relatable and helpful because of it, well I wouldn’t want to invalidate that and perhaps there is a certain part of myself that I should interrogate considering how annoying I found this character. My only counter is that the movie itself doesn’t seem to respect that aspect of them and frames everything through a neuro-typical lens, meaning that the aspects of their character that can be read as neuro-divergent are also read as different from the norm and the film gets a lot of its humor by contrasting their awkward stumbling through social situation with how everyone else expects them to act. It hews much closer to laughing at them than with them, at least from how I interpreted it, and in the end, it just led to an insufferable performance punctuated with mundane punch-up lines.
Now the fact that they threw everything against the wall to see what sticks is central to why this movie is a failure, but that approach does have a single advantage which is that some of it might actually stick and there are parts of this movie I enjoyed in isolation. Whenever the movie calms down with the CG nonsense and focuses on the pain that Barry’s going through, it manages to find some heart and I caught myself getting invested in the big character climax followed by the emotional conclusion to his arc. This is where I would say it’s an improvement on the source material, or at least the version I’m familiar with which is the 2013 animated adaptation of Flashpoint, as that sets the stakes too high for the character arc to hold much significance. Here, the consequences of Barry’s actions are still externally evident, but the true turning point is when it starts to affect them and the personal consequences take center stage which I found to be a much more compelling story. Unfortunately, these moments don’t make up for how much of the movie is taken up by Barry’s annoying antics which is a shame as that screen time could have gone to characters who really needed it like Kara who disappointingly has very little to do in the movie. The actor is good from what we get to see here, but her arc never gets off the ground and she ends up feeling more like a prop than a genuine character in her own right; leaving us with not much more than a test run for much better performance in a future standalone movie. We also can’t talk about what works here without acknowledging the Bat-Elephant in the room and while it doesn’t help this movie all that much, everything with Michael Keaton and The Batman is fantastic in its own isolated little bubble. In terms of the overall narrative, it doesn’t have enough focus to wrangle the rest of the movie into something coherent, but Keaton’s take on an older Batman is one of the best onscreen performances we’ve gotten for the character. He was good in those Tim Burton movies, but he’s perhaps more suited to be The Bat now than he was than he was back then; especially in supporting roles like this where he’s able to bounce off other characters and drag them up to his level. It doesn’t work here, but in a more competent movie, he would have elevated it to an all-time classic. Instead, he just makes this somewhat tolerable for the half of it that he’s in.
I brought the comparison up at the start of this review, so I’ll confirm that it’s at least marginally better than Batman v Superman. True, there was a more coherent vision behind it with Zack Snyder’s gloomy aesthetic carrying us through its needlessly convoluted and morose plot, but none of that movie was as fun as Michael Keaton’s role in this and the emotional beats at the very end actually tugged at my heart strings while BvS couldn’t elicit a single pang of sadness from me when they hit us with the death of Superman. Still, there is no universe where I would sincerely recommend this as even the enjoyable moments with Keaton can’t overcome the tedium of the rest of the movie, but it may just be strange and bewildering enough to appreciate as a bad movie. It’s definitely trying hard enough to be taken as failed seriousness instead of cynical laziness, and there may be just enough heart buried deep inside of it to appreciate in some small way. If there’s any silver lining, at least for DC and Warner Bros, it’s that they’ve already made it clear how the tides are turning and that this can easily be forgotten as they head to their new phase under the stewardship of James Gunn. With a movie like this, even with such a hefty price tag attached to it, giving us all an excuse to shove it down the memory hole is the best course of action and I advise you all to forget about it as soon as possible. That, or get started on some very entertaining video essays about everything that went wrong here because this nonsense is going to fascinate people for years to come!
The Reviewers Unite 