A million years ago, when Ronald Reagan was president and Superman was the only comic book hero to have been adapted into a big-budget movie with A-list actors and top-tier production values, Watchmen writer Alan Moore described The Flash as “a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues.”
Incomprehensible speed is indeed the gift Barry “The Flash” Allen was given when he was struck by lightning and doused in toxic chemicals. (Some guys have all the luck!) So long as he has enough calories pumping through his turbo-powered metabolism, he runs faster than even the Kryptonian immigrant who’s “faster than a speeding bullet.”
Faster than Marty McFly’s plutonium-powered DMC DeLorean.
Faster than Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav can shitcan an already-shot superhero movie.
Given that both The Flash and the contemporaneous Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both faced repeated delays, COVID-related and otherwise, the coincidence of their arrival in cinemas just two weeks apart does The Flash no favors. Thematically and plot-wise, they resemble one another to an even more uncanny degree than most capes-and-tights flicks do. The Flash isn’t bad, especially not by the dismal standards of so many of the DC Comics movies that followed the 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel. It’s frequently quite fun. It’s just not as giddily imaginative as the bold and bracing Spider-flick playing down the hall, and not half as gorgeous to look at. (The long list of directors who were attached to this film before IT’s Andy Muschietti got the job includes, perhaps inevitably, Spider-Verse screenwriters-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller.)
The first act, wherein Ben Affleck’s growling Batman, in his capacity as field marshal of the Justice League, summons Barry—played by human trainwreck Ezra Miller—to Gotham City to evacuate a collapsing hospital, is one of the more joyfully inventive set pieces from a recent live-action superhero flick. It’s also novel to see Batman chase down the creeps who blew up the hospital in broad daylight.
It’s while rescuing a group of newborns from a disintegrating maternity ward that Barry accidentally discovers his ability to run back in time. Did we already know Flash’s mom had been murdered when he was a kid, just like Batman’s folks and Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben? I can’t remember. (Maribel Verdú brings dignity and dimension to what could’ve been a one-note role.) Barry ignores Batman’s Doc Brown-esque warnings against messing with the past and goes back in time to rescue her, accidentally teaming up with his younger self. The mess that ensues is what you might call a Crisis on Infinite Earths.
The Flash is already well on its way to becoming an extended homage to Back to the Future before Bumblebee screenwriter Christina Hodson makes the subtext text with a very good (and historically accurate!) joke about the actor who Michael J. Fox replaced in 1985’s biggest hit after shooting had already begun. If you salivate over those types of film history Easter eggs, or DC Comics Easter eggs, then The Flash is the cinematic omelet for you. If not, you might still find this a reasonable investment of 144 irreplaceable minutes. For all its connections to prior movies and comic books, the movie has a pleasingly self-contained narrative, one that was apparently concocted long before DC hired Guardians of the Galaxy auteur James Gunn to restart the entire DC movie-verse from scratch.
Miller, who was first cast in this part almost a decade ago and whose recent behavior has given the Warner Discovery P.R. team nightmares, is actually one of the film’s weaker elements. Miller uses they/them pronouns, which I mention because it makes the potential for confusion quite high when I tell you that Miller’s scene partner for big chunks of this movie is … Ezra Miller. But they don’t find enough variation between the older, sadder Barry and the younger, much more annoying one.
The 30ish Barry Allen, haunted by memories of his dead mom, fills the college-age Barry Allen, whose mom is still alive, in on the events of the various DC superheroes movies we’ve all seen. But because he’s triggered a rift in the timeline or some such, the Caped Crusader he seeks out turns out to be Michael Keaton, who vacated the Batsuit 31 years ago, after Tim Burton’s delightfully perverse sequel Batman Returns sent parents and merchandising partners screaming.
Keaton turns in a game performance as the long-retired Dark Knight, though nostalgia aside, he’s still not as convincing a superhero as he was a supervillain in Spider-Man: Homecoming six years ago. But he sells graybeard Bruce Wayne’s explanation of the multiverse to the two Barrys using a big bowl of spaghetti he happens to be eating as a prop. (The scene recalls Bruce Willis’ much more staccato untangling of the same idea when speaking to a younger version of himself in Rian Johnson’s 2012 paradox thriller Looper.)
The finale revises the bloody third act of Man of Steel—the part that made so many people hate that movie—with Batman, the two Flashes, and this world’s Kryptonian hero (Sasha Calle) on the side of the puny humans. It pairs some genuinely delightful surprises with some genuinely awful-looking CGI.
If you happen to catch a glimpse of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV during the 1950s, and who was in turn played by Affleck, one of this film’s two Batmen, in 2006’s Hollywoodland, you may wonder just how much more of its own tail this thing can swallow. Always a little more, is the answer. If these misbegotten DC movies can’t outrun their past, running back into it is the next best thing. And “the next best thing” pretty well sums up The Flash.
The Flash opens in theaters nationwide on June 16.