The Flash Review: A Smart Take on Time Travel, Undone by Desperate Fan Service

Instead of a raucous celebration, The Flash feels like a muted parade of regrets.

The Flash
Photo: Warner Bros.

With The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the dysfunctional DC Universe is being primed for a course correction. God and James Gunn willing, something cohesive and maybe fun might even come to pass. Right now, we’ll have to settle for The Flash, which revels in the last 30 years of DC Comics on film, well, flashing before our eyes. But instead of a raucous celebration, it feels like a muted parade of regrets.

It’s a damn shame, because when Andy Muschietti’s film isn’t trying to tie a big sloppy bow on the DCU, it’s an example of the franchise’s output at its best. That is, a thoughtful, character-focused story that, despite its propensity toward fan service, stands up just fine on its own as a YA time travel/alternate universe story where the fact of Barry Allen being the Flash makes it much easier to explain away the logistics of the plot than, say, a flying DeLorean.

In the film, Barry (Ezra Miller) discovers during one of his leisurely super-powered runs that he can break the Speed Force to the point that he can travel backward in time. After consulting Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), he decides to use his new power to save his mother (Maribel Verdú) from being murdered, and, in turn, save his father (Ron Livingston) from taking the fall.

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But even in making the tiniest change, Barry winds up stranded in an alternate 2013, where that timeline’s Barry has experienced absolutely zero tragedy or adversity, and enjoyed the privilege of growing up into an 18-year-old stoner bro. Unfortunately, it’s also a timeline where the events of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel are about to happen, and Superman doesn’t exist to stop it.

The Flash is most effective as a delivery system for character growth—for Barry to recognize the value of his past experiences, both joyful and painful as they are, on who he needs to become. But the current DCU has more than enough morose contemplation, and just as he did with his adaptation of Stephen King’s It, Muschietti smartly knows when to break the tension.

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The opening action set piece alone bears the loose, simple excitement that the DCU had from day one. But much of the lightness comes from the endlessly fascinating alternate Barry, a wiry, excitable himbo who would clearly rather be chowing down on any sandwich than hear another word about the multiverse. Miller doing their own odd-couple schtick, with the more mature Barry bickering back and forth with his slacker doppelganger within the same scene, is a pretty impressive high-wire act to hinge an entire film on. And Miller proves themselves capable of the task, with the script giving them an assist near the finish line, tying alt-Barry’s willful ignorance and perpetual impulse control problems into the climax in a genuinely smart way.

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While there’s a strong beating heart to The Flash, it’s still surrounded by so much fat, damaged by all the mistakes of DCU films past, which makes all of its appeals to nostalgia come across stilted and awkward. As it turns out, alt-Barry happens to reside in the same universe where Michael Keaton’s Batman lives. Keaton isn’t slumming it here—one of the most oddly captivating, actorly moments in The Flash has his Batman explaining the multiverse with a bowl of pasta—but he feels like a vestigial, carefully calculated, and rather cheap crowd-pleaser element at odds with the story, especially given how little the film cares about presenting his Batman in any way evocative of Tim Burton’s playfully gothic take on the universe.

Even less useful to the story is Supergirl (Sasha Calle, making her feature film debut), a stoic, taciturn take on the character straight out of the Snyder playbook, and whose pointlessness is only underlined by the inexplicable, baffling absence of Henry Cavill’s Superman. Both Batman and Supergirl play into a second-act series of action set pieces that come across less like the big crowd-pleasing crossover blowouts of Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Endgame and John Watts’s Spider-Man: No Way Home than a choppy cutscene from one of the Injustice games.

So much of the razzle dazzle in this film comes across as white noise distracting from the material that actually works. Barry and Bruce Wayne talking about the tragedies that shaped them is endearing in its frankness, and wonderful in ways that none of the super-punching that follows is. That conflict between The Flash’s emotional core and the compulsory robot punching gets especially cringe-inducing in the third act, namely in a sequence that would be downright contemptible if not for the emotional beat that’s hammered in the middle of all the fan service.

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Even despite being saddled with the baggage of the DCU’s failures, that the story that works in The Flash manages to shine through the noise is no small feat. The bitter irony, of course, is that even its artistic victories are tempered by the film being released in the shadow of Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which hits nearly every story beat and big swing for nostalgia attempted here, but with exponentially more finesse, grace, and emotional power. Nothing Batman or Supergirl do in The Flash to save the world is more effective than what Barry does to save it with a hug and a can of tomatoes.

Score: 
 Cast: Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck  Director: Andy Muschietti  Screenwriter: Christina Hodson, Joby Harold  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 144 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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