The Flash falters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2023 (1156 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a movie all about smooth, effortless speed, The Flash has hit a lot of stumbling blocks.

There’s its chaotic production history, full of switch-outs and delays.

There’s star Ezra Miller’s troubling and erratic real-life behaviour over the past two years, which involves multiple arrests and assault charges. Potential movie-goers will make up their own minds about what to do with that.

There’s also the clunkiness that hampers almost every comic-book movie in the era of Intellectual Property. Instead of being able to focus on one story, The Flash, with a screenplay from Christina Hodson (Birds of Prey) and Joby Harold (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and direction by Andy Muschietti (It), feels boxed in by a zillion other stories. It’s forced to juggle leftover subplots, shoehorn in brief appearances by certain characters and explain away the absence of others.

The Flash is also squashed between the end of Zack Snyder’s dark reign over the DC Extended Universe and the beginning of a new direction under James Gunn.

So where does this leave the onscreen result? The Flash is undeniably entertaining but exasperatingly bumpy, an unwieldy smash-up of the goofy and the profound, the swift and the sluggish, the weirdly bad and the genuinely good.

Miller plays Barry Allen. In everyday life, he’s an awkward, anxious 20-something forensic investigator, but he has a secret sideline as the Flash, a superhero gifted with super speed.

Barry might complain he’s “the janitor of the Justice League.” Once he gets fuelled up, though — he has a very fast metabolism — he’s happy to head off to a collapsing Gotham hospital to save infants and service dogs and nurses in a peppy opening set piece that’s somewhat undone by extraordinarily creepy digital effects. (Such scary babies!)

After this intro, we switch over to Barry’s origin story, which involves childhood trauma — the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdu) and the wrongful incarceration of his father (Ron Livingston), whose final chance for appeal is imminent.

When Barry inadvertently discovers his speed can reverse the flow of time, he decides to go back to fix the past and save his parents, despite the advice of Batman/Bruce Wayne, played at this juncture by Ben Affleck (looking so darn sad to be there you almost expect to hear The Sound of Silence playing in the background).

Barry returns from his quest to find he has inadvertently created a timeline without superheroes. This becomes an urgent issue when General Zod (a squandered Michael Shannon) shows up, bent on global destruction.

Without the backup of Superman, Barry is stuck with, well, Barry — the alternative version of himself who has grown up in a happy household and turned into a rather sweet slacker with zero superpowers.

The two Barrys share immaculate bone structure but not much else, and the way they play against each showcases Miller’s skill. The Barrys work as a comic double act but also function as a poignant dramatic reminder of what Barry No. 1 has lost.

The Barrys do manage to run into some superheroes. Newcomer Sasha Calle is a wonderfully tough and taciturn Kryptonian, with none of the Midwestern niceness of her cousin Clark. Michael Keaton is a welcome sight as the alt-timeline Batman, weary but undefeated, facing the slightly absurd predicament of the senior superhero with good grace.

There’s the usual dull culminating battle and the now seemingly inevitable multiverse, which fortunately gets a pretty clear explication from Bruce Wayne (the Keaton version) using strands of spaghetti.

This DC multiverse is not as turgid and gloopy as the MCU version, and the variations among timelines are played mostly for laughs. In Barry No. 2’s world, for example, the Back to the Future franchise (a clear reference point for this story) now stars Eric Stoltz.

There are also some very meta jokes, involving real-life cameos or CGI insertions, in which the multiple universes represent different iterations of the DC franchise. (There’s even a brief glimpse of the never-to-be Nic Cage Superman, which fans might be glad to know exists somewhere out there, presumably in a universe wackier than our own.)

The film’s Big Theme is a warning against too much looking back, wishing you could change things, instead of moving forward as you are. This is a lesson The Flash itself doesn’t always hear, but one that could prove valuable for the upcoming DC Extended Universe reset.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com