As the biggest and most bankable genre in the industry, superhero cinema always comes bearing massive levels of hype, anticipation, and expectation. While it hasn’t quite been the undoing of The Flash, it did create the belief that one of the greatest comic book adaptations of all-time is on the cards. Director Andy Muschietti has delivered a very good one, of that there’s little doubt, but it’s also difficult to imagine the long-awaited blockbuster securing classic status.
Overwhelming buzz can often be a double-edged sword, and when everyone from Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav to DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn via A-list megastar Tom Cruise and horror icon Stephen King have been conditioning everyone to expect greatness, The Flash arguably starts with a major disadvantage to overcome.
That’s without even mentioning the tortured development for a project that was first announced in October of 2014, cycled through several writers and directors, endured the negative publicity surrounding star Ezra Miller, and has pissed off a sizeable section of the fandom by driving another nail into the coffin of the SnyderVerse. When The Flash soars it brings palpable excitement and joyous enthusiasm to the screen, but those instances are surprisingly few and far between based on everything potential audiences have been told up until this point.
It might be difficult for some to separate the artist from the art, but in the name of impartiality, Miller is excellent in the title role from beginning to end. The call to have the controversial actor playing dual Barry Allens may not have aged well given recent events, but they evidently relish the opportunity to sink their teeth into two completely different types of performance.
The prime Barry from the established DCU timeline is more jaded and cynical given his traumatic past and misadventures with the Justice League, while the alternate Allen carries the air of buoyancy that comes with not having the weight of the world on his shoulders. Throw them together, and Miller reminds you why they were singled out as such a sparkling fast-rising star before the negative headlines seized the attention.
Throwing Michael Keaton into the mix also adds another engaging dynamic as the veteran Batman gets to grips with the multiversal shenanigans in play, and while the elder statesman of superheroism gets plenty of screentime and fan-baiting callbacks rife with nostalgia, The Flash never truly runs the risk of turning into a Batman Returns sequel at the expense of its true protagonist. Thanks to his charismatically curmudgeonly turn, you might just be left ruing the call to end his comeback as soon as it began in the grander scheme of things.
If you’ve seen a trailer, you know the plot; Barry ends up running so fast that he ends up creating a schism in the fabric of reality, which is all just window-dressing in order to get to the wish-fulfillment elements of bringing the Flashpoint story to life. Along the way, Ben Affleck shows up to dispense sage words of wisdom to remind his young charge that just because you can change the past it doesn’t mean that you should, in an exchange that can generously be described as “Holy foreshadowing, Batman!”
Affleck isn’t in The Flash for very long, but he still manages to remind everyone why his standalone Dark Knight movie will always be viewed as the one that got away, but the throughline established between having two Barrys from two universes with two mentors who both happen to be the Caped Crusader is nonetheless a strong one that helps ground the motivations for when things start going boom.
Speaking of which, though, the CGI is not the strongest element of The Flash by a longshot. While its defenders have claimed that screengrabbing one frame out of context won’t be reflective of what’s up there on the big screen, it kinda is. The effects are inconsistent to the point of being so jarring they take you right out of the story, especially when the film does what virtually every single one of its predecessors – regardless of which company they hail from – has done by hitting the big red emergency button marked “third act action sequence that abandons character in favor of relentlessly hollow spectacle.”
In a similar vein, perhaps the most interesting thing about The Flash is that it doesn’t really have a villain at all; Barry attempting to atone for his mistakes is the central conflict, and while Sasha Calle’s Supergirl makes a strong impression as an imprisoned and enraged Kryptonian who comfortably manages to make an impression that soars above the shadow of Henry Cavill from the get-go, Michael Shannon’s Zod isn’t quite the big bad. Instead, he’s more of a facilitator towards the epic showdowns that exists largely to tie the disparate threads together in time for the grand finale, a disappointing comedown given his memorable debut in Man of Steel a decade ago.
In another case of superhero Stockholm Syndrome that can be applied to almost any film or television project to arrive in the last decade, too, The Flash is substantially better in dealing with smaller, intimate moments than the wham-bang deluge of pixelated carnage. Miller’s interactions with Calle and Keaton are infinitely more interesting than watching weightless objects explode for the hundredth time, but at 144 minutes with a budget hovering around $200 million, there’s an inbuilt obligation to indulge both.
Of course, it’s impossible to pass judgement on The Flash without acknowledging the cameos that haven’t been spoiled yet, of which there are many. Unfortunately, they’re pretty rough, to put it lightly. Poorly-rendered, incorporated in questionable taste on occasion, and seemingly shoehorned in for the sake of nothing other than having viewers everywhere recreate that Leonardo DiCaprio meme, it’s not a stretch to say that you’d end up with exactly the same movie – perhaps even a marginally better one – if the myriad of “guest stars” in question were excised completely.
Like far too many of its spiritual predecessors, then, The Flash has tried to do too much all at once and end up suffering as a result. There’s a story about family reconciliations, reckoning with the traumas of the past, fantasizing about a future that could have happened but got ripped away, a cavalcade of fan service, several worthwhile returning favorites, a time traveling buddy romp, a reset for an entire shared universe, a zany sci-fi comedy, and a fairly routine comic book flick all rolled into one at the same time.
The Flash is good, and occasionally flirts with excellence, but anyone who goes in heading the game-changer that was promised may be left feeling short-changed.
