Review: The Flash (2023)

The idea of reviewing The Flash is a bit of a losing gambit. Go easy on the film and you sound like a child who’s naively happy with the junk food they’re fed all day, not knowing any better. Savage the film and you sound like a person who deliberately wasted two hours and 24 minutes of their life watching a movie they knew they were going to hate; it amounts to telling on yourself and your own lack of a life outside of movie discourse in the process. Ignore its fundamental structural and storytelling problems and you sound like you don’t think a well reasoned story is essential to blockbuster filmmaking. Excuse its bafflingly shoddy CGI and you seem like an apologist for spectacle without any evidence of the spectacular. Defend the performance of its star, Ezra Miller, and you seem like you’re defending a psychopath. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a trap game in sports: an opportunity to embarrass yourself. And yet, here I am, admitting that I liked The Flash well enough.

At least, I did like it well enough in the moment. The Flash does not hold up to scrutiny. Its story, which wants to be Back to the Future (a movie it constantly references in dialogue), does not make sense. Miller’s Barry Allen wants to save his mom, who was murdered when he was a child, and save his dad in the process, as his father was falsely charged and imprisoned for her murder. So he runs so fast that he travels back in time and changes the events of the day of her death, preventing her murder. But the choice to change the past creates a parallel universe, where there’s another version of Barry (also played by Miller) and there are no metahumans to defend Earth from Michael Shannon’s General Zod when he appears to terraform it as he did in Man of Steel.

The decision to pair Barry with a younger version of himself is the best part of the film. It allows The Flash to include an origin story without flashbacks and creates some reflexive tension between our conception of the character and his growth over the films of the DC Extended Universe. The two Barrys are funny together, even if the younger one is grating on the older in the same way that Barry is grating on the older heroes of the Justice League. There are sight gags that work, such as when older Barry tries to activate his flash speed by prancing around absurdly in an empty lobby. There is one genuinely hilarious moment when younger Barry looks over at the older Barry and his ill-fitting mask makes his face seem like a hideous rictus. The concept works. The execution works. But only if you don’t think about it too much, which is the entire bet of the production team behind The Flash.

The decision to pair Barry with another Barry is indicative of the film’s unease with Flash as an iconic hero. He does not get a standalone film. The suits at Warner Bros. don’t trust him to front a movie on his own. So he’s paired with Ben Affleck’s Batman in the early going, Michael Keaton’s Batman in the alternate universe he creates, Sasha Calle’s Supergirl in the film’s climax, and a younger version of himself in the moments that these other heroes aren’t around. The idea is that if the film gives us enough nostalgia, such as in the moments with Keaton, enough humor, with the two Barrys being goofy, enough ridiculous visuals, such as the bizarre Time Colosseum where Barry activates the Speedforce to go back in time, and enough easter eggs referencing other DC films, past, present, future, and never made, we won’t realize that the film doesn’t trust Barry as a character. Doesn’t trust him to grow. Doesn’t trust him to anchor a film. Doesn’t trust him to justify his own story.

So they throw seemingly everything at the wall and see what sticks. I haven’t mentioned Andy Muschietti yet, who directs the film, because what is there for him to do? He can’t shape the film because the executives and the AI chatbot they go to for advice have given him a million things to accomplish, but none of the trust to see any one thing through to fruition. The film is meant to end the DCEU, begin the DCU, cap off Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot’s runs as Batman and Wonder Woman, while also giving the studio the possibility of bringing Keaton back in the future, drawing out more nostalgic connections within future content. It’s a climax and a reboot.

Most of all, it’s a work of cynical nostalgia. How else to explain the cavalcade of cameos in the finale, not to mention the inclusion of Michael Keaton’s Batman, who isn’t really the Batman of the Tim Burton films but rather an embodiment of people’s warm, nostalgic feelings about Keaton’s Batman? The truth is, much of this worked on me. I enjoyed seeing Keaton. I enjoyed Affleck and Gadot getting their final moments together. I enjoyed the time travel plotting and the Frankenstein-style origin story for Flash. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff. And I have to admit it.

But I can’t admit The Flash works as a movie. It worked on me as a way to pass two hours and 24 minutes. I don’t regret the decision to see it on IMAX opening night. The fact that The Flash bombed and will surely be the last time we see many of these characters is also proof that I don’t worry about the film as some indication of what is to come with DC and blockbuster cinema in general. Blockbusters bomb all the time, but studios are in the business of making money and replicating the failed steps of a $200 million bomb is not the way to make more money. So I do not believe that The Flash is some horrifying vision of future cinematic “content.”

As the years pass, The Flash will stand as a film indicative of this moment and Warner Bros.’ profound mishandling of the DC Extended Universe. But as an actual entertainment, it’s just another mediocrity, another movie that you watch to pass the time and to scratch a nostalgic itch or to satisfy a nerdy curiosity, like so many Hollywood films that came before.

5 out of 10

The Flash (2023, USA)

Directed by Andy Muschietti; written by Christina Hodson, based on a story by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Joby Harold, based on characters from DC; starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Michael Keaton.

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