The Flash (2023)

Until recently, I had that unbearable feeling that all maestro movie goers get: that they are agreeing too much with other critics.

Nowadays, all one has to do is go to Rotten Tomatoes and/or Meta Critic and see where one stands against one’s peers. As of late, it seems I have been agreeing with most people on the taste of recent movies. Now comes The Flash, which is sitting at 67% on the tomatometer. That it gives me a chance to disagree with the tomatometer is one of the few positives of the film I can think of.

One can understand the fatigue I and many others have felt the last few years in multiverse story telling, but this is the bottom of the barrel. The story is simple in context, as Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller) is still helping where he can in the world, especially with his mentor Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). Allen is set to appear in court to support his father (Ron Livingston), on appeal again for being wrongfully convicted of murdering Barry’s mother (Maribel Verdú). 

Eventually, Barry realizes he can run fast enough to go back in time (you know, like they did in the original Superman film), and change the past. He tries to be meticulous in this (instead of simply stopping the murder, he makes sure his mom gets the tomatoes she forgot). Still, this leads to catastrophic results as Barry meets an alternate (and somewhat younger) version of himself, along with a different version of Bruce Wayne/Batman (Michael Keaton) and Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), aka Supergirl. In this timeline/universe, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is following the same MO (more or less) as he was in Man of Steel a decade ago.

The story is based loosely off of the storyline in the comics called “Flash Point”, considered one of the best that DC has done in years. While unread by me, I can only assume that fans are just as well better off rereading that. Sure, this film is trying to mean well, but the execution is just so off the charts it is hard to take seriously. 

Yes, it is great seeing Keaton in the Bat Suit again (the first chance I get to do so on a big screen), but that is reduced to only certain parts of the film, not enough to carry it (the film would have been much more interesting if the marketing team did not tell us Keaton would be in the film in the first place.)

Yet the main thing with this film that brings it down to a brand new low is what most casual film goers attend superhero/action flicks for in the first place: the special effects. At least the film lets us know right off the bat in the opening scene where we are going with the film (consider this a minor spoiler). In this scene, Batman (Affleck) is chasing some bad guys who have managed to blow up a hospital. As said hospital is collapsing, there is one room full of newborns (plus one nurse) that can’t escape in time, leaving them all to fall out the window in one of the top floors. So we get slow motion of falling babies (plus an added dog) for The Flash to save. 

It only gets worse from there, as we see the characters in the film’s time line look like the CGI team (who I am sure are talented at their job when they are not rushed) was given a quarter of the time they would normally need to finish their tasks.

Remember in 2017’s Justice League (not the better Snyder cut), when people were freaking out about the CGI on Superman’s face (Cavill had a mustache for another film role he could not shave off). The CGI in this film makes that scene look like Superman had his stache removed by James Cameron.

Parents, the film does have some minor nudity (non sexual), and surprisingly a lot of swearing (one F bomb at the end, and more utterances of “s**t” that I can remember being in a PG-13 film. Middle school and above.

In the end, what makes The Flash such a hot mess is knowing that it is not going to lead to anything. The behind the scenes stuff of this and most of the other films in the failed DCU have made this film seem almost obsolete (and that does not even take into account the personal life events with Ezra Miller). The only thing more mystifying than the DCU not being able to properly form is why we are still getting movies about their characters.

It seems like some problems really don’t have solutions.

Overall: