Tripwire Reviews The Flash

Flash Down The Pan

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at Warner Bros.’ The Flash out in cinemas now in the UK and from Friday in the US. Warning: a few spoilers ahead…

The Flash
Director: Andy Muschetti
Stars: Sasha Calle, Ben Affleck, Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, Michael Shannon

Announced back in 2014 but only really confirmed in 2019 with director Muschetti at the helm, The Flash has had the most chequered production history of not just any DC film but all superhero films. Its errant star Miller’s various real-life shenanigans haven’t helped its pre-launch reputation either.

DC films have generally tanked at the box office over the last few years, which is why they hired James Gunn to come in and sort things out. The Flash is a throwback to the days when Zack Snyder ruled the DC Extended Universe, but the question of course is just how successful is it as a superhero flick?

Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen aka The Flash is a junior police forensics worker with disastrous timekeeping skills, who wants to use his superpowers to go back in time and save his mother who was allegedly murdered by his dad. It’s not a bad conceit and sounds intriguing on paper, despite the hokey trappings. So Allen, thanks to going back in time, has royally screwed up the timeline and the DC multiverse, much like the filmmakers’ approach here. So what starts as a mildly amusing high concept movie becomes a poorly edited and muddy time travel tale with our campy protagonist at its core, an actor who has no onscreen chemistry with his co-stars, and inevitably becomes more and more grating as the running time continues. Allen recruits Michael Keaton, returning, as it turns out, as an alternate world Batman / Bruce Wayne, as well as a younger version of Allen, plucked (I think) from yet another world, and Sasha Calle as Cara/ Supergirl. Our super-friends proceed to battle the machinations of evil and monosyllabic Kryptonian General Zod (Michael Shannon). Zod, returning for a third time, is bent on destroying the alternate world that The Flash finds himself in. You have to hope that both Keaton and Shannon were handsomely well paid as there certainly isn’t any other reason for them to appear in this hideous mess. The plot, such as it is, descends into unintelligible time vortex gibberish for the last forty-five minutes giving us a DC multiverse which seems not to adhere to any kind of internal logic. As part of this multiverse, we get poor CGI renditions of Christopher Reeve and George Reeves as Superman. We even get to see a digital version of Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel who was supposed to appear in the aborted Superman Lives film that was planned in the late 1990s. When Marvel offered us their Spider-Verse, it felt considered and well-delineated but here it is rushed, lazy and illogical.

Miller, who was awful in Justice League, shows that he only has one setting as an actor and his atrocious performance isn’t helped by Christina Hodson and Joby Harold’s abysmal script. Miller’s frequent pratfalls offer nothing here except infantile humour too. I am having to resort to the online thesaurus regularly here as I am running out of different ways to say just how wretched and misconceived this movie is.

Are there any saving graces here? Calle’s Supergirl is potentially an interesting character but her treatment here is anything but, while Keaton looks like he’s counting the money in his head and pointless blink and you’ll miss it cameos from Affleck and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman are equally redundant.

DC’s hit rate compared to Marvel even in this post-Covid and post-Endgame cinema world where superhero films don’t quite engage with the audience in the way that they used to, has always been much poorer. Batman does well at the box office and sometimes Superman does too but Warners and DC have a real problem doing anything decent with the rest of their stable. James Gunn has an Olympian task ahead regarding putting out DC movies which are watchable and fun with some sort of ambition to them. At least it wasn’t three hours long but at certain points it felt like it.

The CW’s Flash series proved that there was a way to portray the character with gusto, relatability and adherence to the source material, but the protracted production time and its troubled genesis, underscored by Miller’s antics, have done this film no favours. Muschetti directed Stephen King’s It so he is obviously a director with some skill, but with a film like this, which feels like it was made by committee, there can’t have been much he could have done.

So despite hope that this film would work on some level, The Flash is a ramshackle, jury-rigged turkey with a monumentally irritating performance(s) from Miller supported by a cast of very bored looking actors who are obviously capable of better things, with an excruciating script and plot. Maybe Warners will use that as a pull quote on the poster.

Here’s the film’s trailer too