Movie Review: The Flash
Andy Muschietti’s The Flash is a bad film. A soulless, ugly, dumb film that perfectly symbolizes everything that is wrong and has been wrong with the films of the DC Extended Universe. It is a movie that only exists for fanboys and Twitter.
Everything that happens in The Flash feels like a series of random events, characters, and plots that were thrown together in an attempt to make a movie. It follows Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), the speedy superhero haunted by his mother’s death and his father’s false incarceration, who discovers he can run so fast that he can actually travel through time to alternate universes. Following this discovery, and against the advice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), he goes to a timeline where his mother is alive. This sets off a chain of events that pits the world in danger.
Nothing about what takes place on screen is cohesive and hardly any of it makes sense. Because we’ve only seen The Flash in Justice League and a few cameos in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, we never got an understanding of who this character was. There was never an intro movie giving us his backstory or even allowing us to get to know who Barry Allen was or what kind of hero The Flash was. I understand we don’t need an intro movie for every superhero, especially for a hero like Batman, whose character backstory we’ve seen several times on screen, but if other non-Batman DCEU heroes like Wonder Woman and Aquaman got intro movies, why not have one for The Flash?
Because Barry and The Flash have never gotten a backstory, The Flash acts as a Flash intro movie. But it also looks at Barry understanding his powers as The Flash and learning the sacrifices of a hero, themes we usually get in superhero movie sequels. So is The Flash also a Flash sequel? The film also throws in a multiverse plot that deals with multiple timelines and brings back several characters we have seen in previous DC films, some in the DCEU, some not. One of those characters is Batman, played in the other universe by Michael Keaton, reprising his iconic role from the Tim Burton films. Batman becomes a central character in the film, so much so, that the film feels equal parts a Flash movie and a Batman movie.
All four of these movies are mashed into one, each one trying to break through and be the main focus of the film. But none of them do and the result is just a series of incoherent events and embarrassingly-bad CGI action sequences.
The most egregious part of The Flash is its deliberate fan service that serves no purpose to the plot and is only in the film to get a reaction from fanboys online. None of the surprises, most of them coming at the end of the film, matter to the narrative. They don’t move the story forward, they don’t expand the universe, and they don’t add layers to the characters. They are only in the movie to get a reaction from the audience and for people to talk about online. They are ham-fisted and annoyingly forced. If I had rolled my eyes any further, I would have seen my brain.
The Flash is a bad movie and bad in the same way all DCEU movies are. It’s over-stuffed, has no interest in expanding a universe or developing any characters, and looks terrible thanks to some truly awful CGI. The Flash is one of the worst movies of 2023 and only exists to be a talking point on Twitter and Reddit.
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