The Flash (2023)

It seemed like a bizarre twist of fate that I saw The Flash exactly ten years to the day after first seeing Man of Steel. (Save your ticket stubs, friends.) So much of The Flash revolves around a sideways retelling of the events of Man of Steel, while at the same time serving as the ostensible finale for the cinematic universe that began with Henry Cavill’s debut as Superman. For this reason – and so many more – it is a challenge to think of The Flash as its own thing, as a superhero movie unto itself. The Flash is by and large a fun time at the movies, but it is so nakedly corporate and so eager to shuffle another franchise off this cinematic coil – and consequently it is difficult for this fan in particular to celebrate and embrace it wholesale.
 
After the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has unlocked the ability to travel backward in time. Hoping to exonerate his wrongfully-imprisoned father, Barry changes the past to prevent his mother’s murder – but in so doing, he creates a universe with no metahumans to stop the invasion of General Zod (Michael Shannon). With only the fiery Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), an aging Batman (Michael Keaton), and his own alternate universe doppelganger (Miller again), Barry must either save the present, restore the past, or lose the future.
 
At the center of whatever you make of The Flash is the cauldron of personal and legal challenges in which Ezra Miller is currently embroiled. A fine enough Flash in ZSJL – and a decent, if overly Spider-Man-esque, variation in the theatrical Justice League – Miller never presented as irreplaceable. And for Warner Bros. to pin their hopes on a film starring not one, but two Ezra Millers, while simultaneously claiming that Batgirl was unreleasable, seemed like such a curious choice. Here again, Miller is quite fun as both Barrys, giving suitably nuanced performances to differentiate the two, but it is equally hard to watch the film and not imagine a less problematic performer in the role.
 
As if to distract from the Miller of it all, the film brings in scores of old faces and a few new ones, too, and on that count I must concede it works. No matter what baggage you bring to the theater with you, there is an undeniable thrill from revisiting Stately Wayne Manor and seeing Michael Keaton fly a Batplane with Danny Elfman’s score thrumming in the background. Keaton has not lost a step as Batman, reinhabiting his idiosyncratic Bruce Wayne with ease. Meanwhile, the other returning Michael reprises his General Zod, albeit with little of the personality and narrative heft that Shannon brought to Man of Steel. It’s a treat to see his Zod again, but his performance feels a bit like someone bringing a favorite action figure out of the toybox and playing only the hits.
 
On the flip side, Sasha Calle’s Kara is scratching the surface of a very interesting take on the character, though she has far less to do than the trailers let on. Still, playing up her role as Superman’s older cousin and riffing on the Flashpoint comics, Calle makes a compelling case for being more than just one cast-off universe’s Supergirl. If the reports bear out the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow film we’ve been promised, I’d say it’s worth giving Calle a fuller shot at the role.
 
And yet, hard as I tried to watch The Flash as its own one-off film about the Scarlet Speedster, it was so very difficult not to view the film as a kind of living funeral, an elegiac wake for an aborted cinematic universe that I’m going to miss so terribly much. For all that it tries to be a celebration of the DC film universe writ large, it was impossible – at least for me – not to feel an accompanying pang of sadness. This, for example, is likely the last time we’ll see Ben Affleck as Batman, and his performance is so touching, partly because it’s an absolutely wretched way to say goodbye, even while he wrings such effective pathos from the bare minimum that the script gives him to do. Ditto Miller, whose performance is nothing overly special until the final act, which gives us a powerful emotional climax that the film scarcely deserves. If this is indeed the final run for this Barry Allen, what a waste to leave just when things were getting interesting.
 
I made the mistake of watching the Flash scenes from Zack Snyder’s Justice League the night before seeing The Flash. It was a mistake because that iteration of the character was so fun and so fresh that I couldn’t wait for more Barry Allen. Those super-speed scenes looked crisp, and I still get a little emotional at Barry’s big “Make your own future. Make your own past” moment. By comparison, The Flash is lousy with muddled CGI (which director Andy Muschietti, bafflingly, insists is deliberate) and the loud-and-clear message is instead, “Stop living your past.” It’s advice that the film might well have taken, riddled as it is with cameos, callbacks, and references – only a few of which are actually well-used and not, frankly, ghoulish. 
 
At the end of the day, though, The Flash is entertaining enough. It’s fun enough. It’s fine. It’s not good enough to merit the extensive discourse around Ezra Miller’s employability. It’s not a great sendoff for the so-called Snyderverse. It’s not an auspicious beginning for the new James Gunn universe – if indeed that’s what The Flash would ever have been. And it’s not even a loving highlight reel for DC Universes gone by, dangling most of its shiny cameos like baubles on a Christmas tree. It’s junk food, albeit junk food that happens to star some of my favorite fictional characters. But if it’s going to leave my preferred interpretations of those characters lying face-down in a puddle, turning them into punchlines instead of paragons, this might just be where I jump off the cosmic treadmill.
 

The Flash is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some strong language, and partial nudity.” Directed by Andy Muschietti. Written by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Joby Harold. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, and Michael Keaton.