Movie Review: ‘The Flash’

Director: Andy Muschietti

Cast: Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck

Plot: Barry Allen has developed his powers to the point that he can move through time. After disregarding Batman’s warning, Barry travels back in time to prevent his mother dying. In doing so he becomes trapped in a timeline without super-powered metahumans.

Review: Here’s a fun fact: this movie went into pre-production before the TV series The Flash, and didn’t see release until after the TV show finished a nine season run. The number of restarts, script rewrites and director changes makes this feel like the superhero movie version of Duke Nukem Forever. Like that game, it wasn’t worth the wait.

Right off the bat, the very first scene, it gets frustrating. Barry (Miller) is low on energy and needs some nutrition, and we see him frustrating with slow-moving service workers. That bit is fine, but Barry is called away to deal with a collapsing hospital full of babies. After arguing with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) about this – something we’re coming back to – Barry heads out and encounters some fans. He asks them to throw him a candy bar for a boost. He’s awkward, so it hits him in the head and lands on the road. So then he runs to the hospital and starts complaining that he needs food.

Why didn’t you pick up the candy bar, Barry? It’s right there. If you’ve already filmed him looking for food in the hospital, just cut this bit. You really don’t need it. Every scene feels like the product of multiple writers. We get heartfelt moments over a murdered family member back-to-back with whacky routines backed by actual clown music.

We’ve never been a fan of this version of Barry Allen. His weird physical tics are uncomfortable, especially the possibility that this is meant to be a representation of autism. Whatever the thinking is, it isn’t helped by his habit of arguing with people who really shouldn’t be and don’t need to be arguing with. He argues with Alfred of getting to a burning hospital and then rescuing babies before the wing collapsed. Just go there, you’re pretty fast. He argues with multiple Batmen when he could be helping people. He just sucks. Amazingly, the other version of Barry (also Miller) is substantially worse. Although it’s said that he’s 18, he has the temperament and manner of a 7 year old. His catchphrase is a flat, creepy giggle that sounds better suited to Muschietti’s previous films. Every time he does it my skins crawls. This is a character we need to feel an emotional connection to this character for the movie to work, he can’t be this unsettling.

It’s weird that they decided to go with the ‘Flashpoint’ story right out the gate. This is a story that gives us an alternative history for a character, but we haven’t had a history with this character yet. His first opportunity to flesh out the role, and they immediately saddle us with a (horrible) alternate version of him. You have to give us time to get to know the characters before you start teaming them up, facing them off against each other, killing them and pulling out multiverse versions of them, but DCEU never managed to grasp this. The only benefit of this hurried approach is that we can use Flashpoint as a way to wipe the slate clean.

That’s not true, being able to pack the movie with cameos is also a benefit. Everyone loves seeing old performers returning to a role, or previously impossible team-ups like Peter Parkers from different franchises. They do, however, manage to make a mess out of this as well as the stories, characters, style and…everything. Michael Keaton is fine, he’s still bringing a good energy to the role and manages much better than members of the modern Justice League.

Ben Affleck reprises the role of Batman one last time, and continues to get nothing but terrible material. The approach is to look up the most commonly repeated Twitter ‘Hot Takes’ on the character and then use them as a punch line. So in this movie, under the influence of the Lasso of Truth, Batman rabbits on about using his wealth to tackle poverty instead of vigilante justice being the right thing to do. Firstly, Batman would never question his approach to crime and secondly, we’ve all heard this one before. This is what movies are going to look like when AI has taken over. Gal Gadot turns up to wear her costume and stand in from of a Green Screen in a different building to the other actors, most likely on the same day she filmed her Shazam cameo. Jason Momoa didn’t bother with the costume and just rolled around in a puddle instead.

Then comes the big scene where we see a bunch of different Supermen and whatnot from multiple sources, and all we get are ghoulish looking CGI models staring off into space. This becomes doubly ghoulish when some of these performers having already passed away, George Reeves possibly having suicided due to being unable to get away from the role. Maybe dredging up a digital corpse to make the audience point at the screen and say “oh, that’s George Reeves” isn’t a great idea. At the other end of the spectrum, a long-haired Nic Cage fighting a giant spider gets a look in, a reference to a project that never got made. It’s all just a desperate attempt to appeal to nerds and feels terribly shallow.

Even compared to other big-budget superhero films this one relies incredibly heavy on CGI. You’ve got all the usual high-speed fight scenes this role needs, but you’ve got massively complex and visually noisy time-travel scenes (that are pretty well designed), dead celebrities to render and the main character’s face needing to be copy-pasted onto another performers face. The resources – money, time or workers – put towards these aspects of the film have not been evenly distributed. The Flash runs up a building to rescue a horde of babies who somehow looks worse that the Twilight thing all these years later. Ezra Miller’s face floats weirdly over the head of the stand-in in almost every scene they share, which isn’t helped by the awful, awful giggling. Very little looks believable and even less looks pleasant. It’s Cats all over again…not just bad, but unpleasant.

We did like the design of the time-travel sequences, but we’re struggling to find more positive notes for this film. Michael Keaton is always worth the time, but gets saddled with the monster twins. In the second half of the movie we get Sasha Calle as Supergirl and she is genuinely rad. It’s a new take on the character and she is a compelling performer. If there’s only one thing salvaged from this disaster, it should be her. So long as we don’t need to see this slapstick-version-of-autism Barry Allen the stars aligned to curse us with. Should’ve just replaced him with Grant Gustin the moment they went multiverse.

Rating: TWO out of TEN