The Flash (2023)

Score: 3 / 5

Barry Allen, as his alter-ego The Flash, is tired of being a second-tier superhero, the "janitor" of the Justice League, cleaning up after his more famous comrades and taking care of the "lesser" criminals; he's also never quite gotten over the destruction of his family, when his mother was suddenly murdered and his father imprisoned for the crime. So when, near the beginning of this film, his emotions get the better of him and he unintentionally runs fast enough to go back in time, he sees an opportunity to save his family. He takes it, against the advice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), and chaos ensues. Time travel. Alternate realities and dimensions. Franchise amalgamation. Lots of fan service. It's all nothing new to us in the age since the DCEU branched into the CW; hell, it's taken for granted now, when the Best Picture Oscar most recently went to a multiverse-spanning drama in Everything Everywhere All at Once. But, as is typical of this franchise -- and, increasingly, the MCU as well -- The Flash is at once a rousing and delightful romp through sci-fi fantasy and a messy, pandering attempt to generate money and collect all existing versions of the media under one banner.

Ezra Miller stars, of course, and he proves himself capable of leading a manic film like this with his signature eccentricities (real-life shenanigans notwithstanding). His performance won't be to everyone's taste -- I found him grating at best -- but he certainly commits to his dual performances once his present-day character meets himself from 2013 and they team up. 2013 Barry is unbearable, whereas present-day Barry is thankfully more grounded, and it's clear at least that Miller had fun with the duality. Specifically as he starts realizing how annoying he can be to others, Miller's Barry rises wonderfully to the occasion to become the hero he always wanted to be. The problem is that we've seen this story before, more than once, and so I found myself wondering time and again why the studio wanted this story at this time. Its bizarre mashup of It's a Wonderful Life and Back to the Future is neither original nor particularly relevant, though Christina Hodson's screenplay (she also wrote the wonderful Birds of Prey) deftly captures the focus of Barry's story on his relationship with family and his inability to cope with lasting trauma, and those quiet moments of character development shine brightly in this otherwise deeply chaotic flick.

Director Andy Muschietti clearly has fun with this material, and so it's hard to say exactly whence comes this chaos. Its breakneck pace and insane visuals may lie with Muschietti, but he also embraces the warm closeups and thematically crucial scenes, giving them due pause and reverence. Notably, any scene with Barry and his parents -- Maribel Verdú and Ron Livingston -- are deeply emotional and wonderfully realized. Perhaps its hectic, overstuffed screenplay are to blame, but most segments of the film are directly relevant to the full story it wants to tell. The bizarre score and visual effects -- cartoonish and immature, both, at best -- made me more than once wish the producers had seen the new Spider-verse movies and taken some inspiration. Then again, maybe they did just that, as I repeatedly forgot that The Flash is primarily a live action feature amidst the sheer volume of CGI.

Speaking of which, it should be noted that, in the film's climax (we'll get to it in the next paragraph), Barry repeatedly runs back through time to alter the outcome of his battle against the villain, and keeps entering the Speed Force, depicted cleverly and eye-poppingly as something like an hourglass chronometer with elements of pop-up book mechanics and theatre in the round. As he does so, alternate timelines manifest before his eyes, and soon enough alternate dimensions begin to materialize and collapse together. In this sequence, other Warner Bros properties make cameos in ways that would be exciting if the Spiderverse movies and X-Men movies and MCU hadn't already done it. It's still fun and all to see Christopher Reeves and Nic Cage and Henry Cavill all as Superman, Adam West as Batman, Teddy Sears as Zoom, Helen Slater as Supergirl, and even the Joker as performed by both Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson. It's a little weird because they all appear to be created completely digitally (which will alienate viewers who can't glide over the uncanny valley), and the organic magic feels a bit forced, but it's still a clever and ultimately harmless way to renew interest in all the previous versions of these characters and retroactively unite them under a single franchise banner.

Some will decry the franchise's repeated use of General Zod's 2013 invasion of Earth as depicted in Man of Steel, but I do find its inclusion here interesting and satisfying, as it underscores the film's determined message that there are some crucial, "canonical" events that ultimately cannot be changed no matter the circumstances or attempts to alter the past. This is something pretty much every multiverse movie has flirted with or simply skirted, but The Flash comes right out and says it, making his stand against Zod that much more riveting because Barry has to try and assemble his own team to fight Zod (Michael Shannon). The other Justice League members don't exist in this alternate timeline, except for a different version of Batman, played by Michael Keaton in a delightful return to the role. Together, they mount a rescue for who they think is Superman but who turns out to be Supergirl (Sasha Calle), then they revisit the climactic battle time and again. The action is peripatetic at best, to say nothing of the dubious visual effects, but the dialogue is fascinating as the two Barrys argue over whether repeated time travel will solve their problems or create a worse mess. I'll give you one guess what they learn.

Thankfully, and this is where the film most strongly succeeds: Barry swallows the tough pill and accepts the awful truth that he cannot save his family. Far too many superhero movies endorse bad behavior and wish fulfillment -- indeed, enthusiastically embrace, if you recall the original two Christopher Reeve-led Superhero movies -- on the part of both the irresponsible, self-denying hero and the audience hoping for a "happy" ending. The Flash eschews this tendency, forcing Barry to make a melancholic decision and accept for the first time the fate that brought him to his current life. And sure, it ends on a hopeful note, especially regarding his incarcerated father, but that didn't stop me from weeping in the cinema during the finale sequence. After so much adrenaline-fueled chaos, that was an emotional turn I was completely unprepared to handle.