The Flash Review: Moments Of Spectacle Can’t Redeem This Jumbled Mess

Posted in: Flash, Movies, Review, Warner Bros | Tagged: dc studios, The Flash, the flash movie, Warner Bros

The Flash might feature some of these good moments, but they don’t add up to anything, and at the end of the day, the film as a whole is an overly long mess with a few bright spots and a massive missed opportunity when it comes to Supergirl.

The Flash comes into theaters carrying the baggage of nearly a decade of production mishaps, and that was before the very serious allegations leveled at the star. So it’s not surprising that the final film features only brief moments of spectacle that ultimately add up to nothing of substance and don’t even create a coherent movie.

Director: Andy Muschietti
Summary: Barry Allen uses his super speed to change the past, but his attempt to save his family creates a world without superheroes, forcing him to race for his life in order to save the future.

The Flash went into production in 2014, which means it has been in development in some form for nearly a decade. Since then, it has had nearly half a dozen different directors, gone through multiple owners at Warner Bros., at least a couple of page-one rewrites, and numerous COVID delays. This baggage was already hanging on this movie’s shoulders before star Ezra Miller first allegedly choked a fan in a bar in April 2020, and things only got worse from there. So, to say that a lot was going on with this movie before it even made it to theaters would be the understatement of the century. It also isn’t surprising that a film that has been kicking around this long is a complete mess at the end of the day.

From a structure and pacing standpoint, The Flash is all over the place. The film has to explain a lot about the rules of time travel and what powers this version of Barry has. So, they decided to have those exposition dumps carried by Barry explaining to a younger version of himself what was happening. The thing is, this version of Barry isn’t charming, but instead annoying, and he only gets more annoying when we see the younger version of him. For some reason, the production told Miller to have their younger version of Barry do this obnoxious laugh that is grating the first time you hear it and like nails on a chalkboard the tenth. There are whole scenes in this film that are just Miller acting opposite of themself and explaining the plot so we understand what is happening. The pacing grinds to a halt because time travel is complicated, and if that means taking an extended scene with three completely useless characters to very slowly tell [not show] one of the ways Barry has broken the universe? Then we’re going to watch minutes of that scene with no reprieve.

There has been a running joke from almost the moment the first footage of The Flash dropped that this wasn’t a Flash movie but a Batman movie, and the script is leaning extremely heavily on Michael Keaton and his version of Bruce Wayne making an appearance in the plot. Keaton, at times, seems like he’d rather be anywhere else, while at other times, he does seem engaged. However, if you want to see a darker and more depressed version of this character, Birdman already exists, and this doesn’t add much. Bruce is here as another example of “look how different this world is,” shameless fanboy pandering, and an extended metaphor involving Italian food. Bruce, and to an extent Kara as well, are barely characters in their own rights. The trailers have overblown Kara’s place in the story, and she really only comes into play in the third act. Sasha Calle is doing the best she can with the crumbs the script gives her, and if there is any justice in the world, she’ll get the opportunity to play the character again.

When it comes to shameless fanboy pandering, there are good ways and bad ways to go about doing it. The different villains and the two Peter’s in Spider-Man: No Way Home had places in the plot and were extremely involved in the final battle. We saw Toby Maguire Peter finally truly forgive Norman, and we saw Andrew Garfield save MJ to forgive himself for failing to save Gwen. Even in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the Illuminati didn’t do that much, but at least Wanda got to kill them in interesting and gruesome ways. Aside from Keaton and his place in the story, the rest of the big secrets that The Flash is hiding are the worst kind of cameos and easter eggs because they mean nothing. They are set dressing, a frame to make people go, “Hey, look at that,” and nothing else. One of these cameos has already been leaked by director Andy Muschietti himself, and it is the worst kind of terminally online thing that the general public will not understand at all. The most egregious example might be the final scene, which was different from the cut shown at CinemaCon back in April, and the final cut is somehow worse to the point that they shouldn’t have changed a thing.

As said in the headline, there are brief moments of spectacle that work. Almost anything that shows Supergirl off doing her thing is fun to watch, and Calle has a real presence on screen. They do something interesting with her regarding how they approach the character and how this version came into the world compared to Clark. She looks like she could break someone in half with her pinky finger, which is what we want from our super ladies. There is a fight with Keaton Batman that is very well done and will make fans of the first two Batman films happy because it looks like Keaton can actually move in his suit. The opening scene, which features the Ben Affleck version of Batman, is okay aside from some really wonky-looking VFX work, specifically some involving babies that will be a throwback for anyone who watched the last two Twilight movies. It’s a creative scene that uses both heroes’ unique powers and is decently executed. Barry interacting with his mother in any timeline is also a high point, and the final moments between them are about as close to choked up as you can get.

The Flash might feature some of these good moments, but they don’t add up to anything, and at the end of the day, the film as a whole is an overly long mess with a few bright spots and a massive missed opportunity when it comes to Supergirl. The post-credits scene, which was the other added bit that was not included with the CinemaCon cut, might be one of the worst post-credits scenes in a very long time. It adds nothing, it does nothing, and it practically teases nothing. If The Flash is the new foundation of the DC universe that James Gunn and Peter Safran are building off of, and there are hints in the film that it just might be, then the future of the universe just got a little grimmer. You can’t build on a cracked and broken foundation; DC has tried this once and failed to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and if this is the new foundation? Maybe we’re in for another cracked and broken foundation. At least Blue Beetle looks like it could be unconnected to this mess.

The Flash

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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3.5/10

The Flash comes into theaters carrying the baggage of nearly a decade of production mishaps, and that was before the very serious allegations were leveled at the star. So it’s not surprising that the final film features only brief moments of spectacle that ultimately add up to nothing of substance and don’t even create a coherent movie.

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