The Flash film review — shaky $200mn superhero movie needs saving

The movie star is dead, they say. Not so dead, it turns out, that they can’t still give a studio a migraine. Witness The Flash, a mid-ranking superhero project from Warner Bros whose casting has made it a Hollywood test case. The lead is Ezra Miller, the mercurial American actor who, having shot the film in 2021, then faced multiple accusations of troubling conduct. (Miller, who uses the pronouns they/them, has issued an apology for “past behaviour” and blamed mental health issues.) In the wake of these, the $200mn movie reportedly came close to being scrapped. Instead, it now comes out with the character all over the ads, but the actor barely glimpsed in advance publicity. “Please watch our film starring Ezra Miller”, the tagline might read. “Please also don’t look at Ezra Miller.” 

We open in line with that catch-22. Miller’s everyday forensics whizz Barry Allen is given just enough screen time to establish himself as loveable nerd before his hyper-accelerated alias is called into action. A sinkhole gapes under a tower-block hospital. From an upper floor maternity ward, a cascade of newborns are flung into the sky. Ninety-eight years after a single pram bounced down the Odesa Steps in Battleship Potemkin, the sequence is oddly perfect: a slapstick overture giddy enough to fix your attention on-screen, and on-screen only.

But saving raining babies is kids’ stuff next to the story ahead. The crux is another kind of crisis: the bloody murder of Barry’s mother, for which his father is on trial. Listen for the small sigh of the Warner Bros publicist hoping we could keep things light, and the clang of tonal mismatch. Time travel is the proposed solution, unveiled by director Andy Muschietti in a murk of bad CGI. Verbal interventions are no clearer. Batman (Ben Affleck) advises Barry against tinkering with history. “Our scars make us who we are,” he broods. “Don’t let the past define you.” Find the interior logic there and you’re a bigger superhero than me.

Barry gatecrashes the past anyway. What awaits is his own younger self: a giggling nit with whom the older version sets to bickering. Two Millers, then: double the fun for our Warners PR, but a serviceable premise for the retro-themed comedy the movie doubles as. And yet nothing is quite enough for Muschietti. Time travel segues in turn into the sick-of-me-yet device of a multiverse. Cue endless callbacks to Supermen and Batmen past, some physical, others spectral. Most of the old guard seem happy to be involved. That much is not a given elsewhere. Watching Michael Shannon’s General Zod, it is hard to know how much his scowling distaste is performance at all. By then, the movie has spun into generic Sturm und Drang.

And so we come to the central conundrum of The Flash. Amid the din, the same thing that left the film near-unreleasable is what makes it halfway watchable: Miller. It’s not that their presence isn’t thorny, or even that their performance is unflawed. But their twitchy charisma is all that stops the whole nervously overstuffed enterprise from collapsing in on itself.

The timing is interesting with Hollywood actors now considering a strike. Their complaints include the potential of AI to one day, say, whip up performers who won’t then threaten to capsize $200mn blockbusters. But, for now, the bug in the system is obvious. The film star may not be as dead as all that. Even having nearly wrecked a movie, they can also be what rescues it.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from June 16