THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. It’s both interesting and disheartening that superhero movies have morphed into garish cameo cavalcades that pull visuals — and sometimes even actors — from decades-old superhero movies to sell tickets. Try to reconcile the grimly nuts Michael Keaton from Tim Burton’s gothic Batman with the genial, sandals-wearing hermit he plays in The Flash, then imagine Keaton explaining multiversal theory — to, I don’t know, Alfred — using a bowl of spaghetti. If you can’t, congratulations; your brain’s wiring is still intact. The wiring of Andy Muschietti’s The Flash, however, is bonkers.
When The Flash begins, we see “Justice League janitor” Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) doing Gotham City clean-up for Batman (Ben Affleck) in a sequence that features a collapsing building brimming with falling burritos, therapy dogs, and unconvincingly rendered CG infants. The computer effects in this movie are some of the worst I’ve seen in recent memory; I’d compare its goofball energy, visuals, and vivid color work to the pop frittery of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984, executed just as clumsily.
Barry yearns for more than just superhero busy work. You’ll remember from Zack Snyder’s Justice League movie that he was attempting to spring his father Henry (Ron Livingston) — legally, of course — from Iron Heights Prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Long ago, Henry was convicted of murdering his wife, Nora (Maribel Verdú), which set Barry on a hero’s journey of self-discovery that led him to become The Flash, one that now officially takes place entirely offscreen.
But at least we, like Barry, know that Henry couldn’t have killed Nora because Muschietti has assembled some warmly-made flashbacks that show he and his wife were utterly in love. Batman also has camera evidence that Henry was elsewhere when the deed was done, but, thanks to fate, that footage doesn’t work out for Barry or Henry like it’s supposed to. I figure this next bit could be considered a spoiler, but it demonstrates how surface-level this movie really is: we never get an idea of who killed The Flash’s mom because the movie isn’t interested in exploring that aspect of the story. (For an interesting take on this, watch season one of CW’s The Flash.) So why are we here if not to solve Nora’s murder? Right: the multiverse.
Barry’s grief propels his speed to the extent that he can transcend time and space. We watch him land in a dimension where his mother is still alive, and a younger, more obnoxious version of himself wanders through life without any superpowers of his own. While it’s nice to finally sit down to dinner with his mom, Barry is soon faced with a reality-threatening dilemma: there aren’t any superpowered Justice Leaguers on this Earth to help Barry return home, nor are there heavy hitters to help him thwart a sudden invasion from General Zod (a visibly bored Michael Shannon), the villain of 2013’s Man of Steel.
The Flash, like Spider-Man: No Way Home (another live-action multiverse product), pulls from other, better movies and uses their fondly-recalled story points as its own. In this case, The Flash uses Man of Steel’s big, brutal finale to unite its own meager version of the Justice League, one that includes that staggeringly unappealing version of Ezra Miller I mentioned, an underutilized Supergirl played by Sasha Calle, and Michael Keaton, who decided that his big return as Batman should be this. The chaos that ensues from this story choice fits to a degree because, after ten years of directionless DC movies, Muschietti is at least providing us with a cosmic conundrum — how do you stop Zod in a world without Superman? — that functionally brings Warners’ DC experiment full circle.
It is, however, difficult to parse Muschietti’s vision of the DC Universe. It’s junky, rude, and rowdy like Taika Waititi’s unfocused, ritalin-powered Thor: Love and Thunder, and while it pulls from the works of Snyder and Burton, he never manages to create a visual stamp of his own. He does have a knack for gross-out humor — several scenes with the alternate-Barry include vomit, bare ass, and half-lidded stoner types — and there are a few standout moments where Barry’s application of speed thrillingly pushes our limits of perception and sense. How he zips through locked doors, for example, is insane to watch.
Other aspects, like the Zod invasion, are previsualized Lego filmmaking glop, handled so frenetically that they strangle the life from the film’s fumbling attempts at drama later on. Angst and anxiety fuel The Flash, like the high-calorie diet that fuels Miller’s Scarlet Speedster, and the movie tosses both into a cosmic mixing bowl alongside generations of films and television shows with their own baggage to contend with. Characters come and characters go, in a confluence of crises that bludgeon the senses and are hideous to behold — and not just because our heroes frequently turn into grayed, dead-eyed digital avatars of themselves. The Flash watches like a movie that was never intended to be released.
If it sounds like I’ve soured on the multiverse concept that’s become a fan-appeasing lifeline for the soggy superhero mega-genre, allow me to submit my review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a better multiverse movie than The Flash that has its own problems yet still manages to ground itself with human things we can relate to. The Flash takes a broader view of humanity — in a way, it’s more of a cartoon than Spider-Verse — where we recognize things like comedy because people barf and things like tragedy because people occasionally let tears fall down their faces.
The Flash has been a hot potato for Warner Bros. even before the well-documented troubles of star Ezra Miller began to dim its prospects. Its pre-production marathon has certainly passed along several batons: before Muschietti hopped on, Seth Grahame-Smith and Rick Famuyiwa were among a murderer’s row of directors considered for the project. Both ducked out due to pesky creative differences with the studio. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the duo behind this year’s crowd-pleasing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, also had aspirations to direct. Their comic stamp on the movie remains in part thanks to a script by Birds of Prey writer Christina Hodson.
Then there’s the looming presence of the Snyder-led DC Extended Universe, itself an entire longbox filled with issues that launched in 2013 with Man of Steel, introduced The Flash to filmgoers with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and has finally, mercifully, been laid to rest here. (At least, I think so — at any rate, James Gunn is currently rebooting the entire DC Universe.) Then, as now, the question for Warners has been: what’s to be done with this Barry Allen? By the time its credits roll, after all these years and delays to finally make it happen, The Flash doesn’t have an answer.
4 out of 10
The Flash hits wide release on Friday.
Directed by Andy Muschietti.
Screenplay by Christina Hodson.
Story by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Joby Harold.
Cinematography by Henry Braham.
Starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, and Michael Keaton.
Produced by Barbara Muschietti and Michael Disco.
Rated PG-13 for barf and bum-baring speed force shenanigans.
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