The Flash Review
Horrific CGI, a plot that makes little sense, and a deeply unsatisfying conclusion, all delivered only a couple of weeks after one of the greatest superhero movies of all time, makes for another disappointing DC adventure.
Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is living his day to day as The Flash, helping the Justice League fight crime. But he still laments the loss of his mother, and his father’s imprisonment. When he finds a way to go back in time using his super speed, he does so - despite the warnings of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). He goes back and saves his mother, but in doing so resets the universe. He finds himself stranded in an earlier time - General Zod (Michael Shannon) is about to come to Earth, and Barry has to team up with his younger self and an alternate Batman (Michael Keaton) to find Supergirl (Sasha Calle) and stop him, all while finding a way to put the universe right.
The Flash, hyped off the back of CinemaCon as one of the best superhero movies of all time, is a frankly disappointing product. Visually, thematically, and on a bare bones execution perspective, the movie just does not work.
Let’s tackle the visuals first, because one of the most exciting things about the Flash’s appearance in earlier DC films was how cool his slo-mo visuals looked. Lightning sparking around him, warping space and time. Who doesn’t love that scene of a resurrected Superman’s eyes flicking to the slo-mo Flash, and reaching out to knock him off balance? Here, the visuals look garbage. The historically great looking slo-mo looks weird and terrible. The baby scene at the start is horrid, and the chronosphere time warp region looks like it was shot in the early 2000s.
As much as these ones stand out, rightly, for their objectively terrible VFX, perhaps the most shocking work happens with Zod. While objectively not as bad, what really shocks is that we have seen these exact fights and exact scenes pretty much, in Man of Steel, and back then they looked better! Director Andy Muschetti takes a character who already fought on Earth, and drops him into a gray, random desert landscape, and makes it look 100x worse than it did in the visually stunning Man of Steel.
The story also just does not work. The leg work for Flash really has not been done to the point where you can jump into this sort of multiversal content. It’s nice to see Keaton back as Batman, and Sasha is fantastic as Supergirl (although with some of the worst effects of the entire movie), but these characters and the journey they go on is at once too high stakes, too low stakes, and too unresolved to be of any real import. The ending, in a sign of how deeply off the rails this gets, feels both unearned in its scope, and wraps up too neatly in a little bow in about 20 seconds.
A lot has been said about Ezra Miller and the pervasive off screen antics seeping into perception of their performance. Outside of that, their work as the two Barry’s is both clearly defined and strong, but also a little miffing as an audience member. Once the younger version of the character begins his descent arc, the movie picks up speed a little, but until then there is a sort of misbalance, where you are meant to be rooting for the original Flash, but he comes across boring and un-fun by comparison. What made this character sing in the previous films, has seemed to be done away with here, in service of making the older and younger versions of the character more distinct.
There are a couple of nice, fun cameos, and a couple of troubling (ethics-wise) cameos, but ultimately the movie is a bit of a misfire.
