The Flash (Muschietti, 2023)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Spoilers for The Flash follow.

There’s a brief window in The Flash, the latest misguided and generally miserable DC Universe cinema experience to limp its way onto the screen, when we get a different kind of flash – a glimpse, a vision even, of a better movie. The first thirty or so minutes of the film, in which Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) discovers that he can move through time, and perhaps even alter it, has a zippy, enjoyable and often emotionally resonant tenor. If you can stomach the presence of Miller, who has been beset by controversy and a range of allegations of abuse in the time between production and the eventual release of The Flash, then his rendering of Allen is striking and undeniably strong. The story’s emotional arc is there – Allen wishes to go back into the past and slightly change the circumstances that led to the death of his mother. It all hinges on a detail that seems utterly insignificant, a likeable storytelling element that helps to ground the crisis Allen is having in the real. The film tips its hat often in these early scenes to Back to the Future, the gold-standard of Hollywood time travel adventures, which is certainly a decent – if unachievable – bar to attempt to clear. 

Then the film keeps going, and all that is exhausting and dispiriting and ghoulish about the current spate of blockbuster filmmaking in which we find ourselves crashes headlong into the movie and never again leaves. The Flash is perhaps the ultimate example of the cynicism of IP-driven franchise-making, in which even the bones of a story, the pieces that drive emotional investment, are just another piece intended to leverage bland nostalgia and drive ticket sales for ongoing films further down the line. In a sense, it’s exhausting to even run down the list of what makes The Flash far less than the sum of its parts, because it’s the same issues that plagued other soulless cash-ins of the modern superhero franchise machine like Spiderman: No Way Home, Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It’s barely a surprise, at this point, that the story and characters who should be at the centre become, for all intents and purposes, afterthoughts to the need for The Flash to feed into a ‘multiverse’, to offer up moments of fan-recognition of properties that have come before. 

Billed as a kind of intermediary between the tortured current onscreen iteration of the DC Universe and the new, James Gunn-led vision to come, IT director Andy Muschietti’s long-fomenting The Flash finally arrives on-screen on a wave of toxic press. As it trods from promising beginnings to a befuddled climax, the film comes to evoke our current, deeply compromised cinema landscape in general. 

Even in marketing for The Flash, it was abundantly clear it wasn’t Barry Allen that was the primary draw of this instalment. Perhaps part of that was the circumstances of Miller’s current situation, but the posters and trailers for the film that heavily hyped the presence of a returning Michael Keaton as Batman (as in Tim Burton’s Batman, from way back in 1989), and a young, punkish Supergirl (newcomer Sasha Calle) told another tale – here was yet another obligatory chance to see actors reprise roles that ended long ago, to clap and cheer when Keaton’s Bruce Wayne utters ‘I’m Batman’, as he once did. Anything that is promising about The Flash quickly cedes the spotlight to this impulse, sans any of the directorial vision, the aesthetic or the atmosphere that made the original Batman great. 

Director Andy Muschietti, who made two decidedly middlebrow films out of Stephen King’s insidious horror epic IT, at first showcases a lively, antic side in an early chase scene that leads to a delightfully insane and slightly macabre setpiece involving newborn babies and cute dogs falling from the sky. As The Flash descends deeper into the mire of alternate universes and new Batmans and Supermans, however, Muschietti feels entirely unable to wrangle this unwieldy beast of a thing. Though we are ostensibly in Burton’s Batman world, little of that film’s gothic archness has bled into The Flash. Rather, Keaton’s Batman is trapped in the colourless special effects slush of the modern blockbuster – and the contrast is deeply unflattering. Keaton tries his best, underplaying dutifully in order to give his Bruce Wayne a touch of class amidst the clownery – but he can only do so much. Likewise, Calle is a bright and intriguing new talent – her Supergirl is full of resentment and youthful rage, a far cry from her noble saviour of a cousin. The film, stretched thin with franchise obligations, including a drawn-out and staggeringly ugly climactic battle in the desert with a resurrected General Zod (Man of Steel’s Michael Shannon, here totally on autopilot), finds little to do with these heroes beside allow audiences a momentary flicker of recognition. 

That is, ultimately, the purpose of The Flash – to deliver those hollow moments of nostalgic cash-grabbery. In watching these films, I often wonder how this train of diminishing returns keeps on chugging. Surely that fleeting moment of recognition ultimately rings as deeply unsatisfying, so thin and shadowy is its conjuring of some past feeling of childhood joy. The Hollywood industry has bet big on this feeling, in the hope that simply reminding a viewer of something they once watched and enjoyed is as good as the real thing. The Flash joins other franchise-extending films like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Rogue One in ensuring that even the death of a beloved actor is no barrier to the possibility of profiting off of their likeness, as a range of dead actors who once played superheroes – including some who died tragically – are resurrected in utterly ghoulish fashion here, through some astoundingly terrible visual effects. This sequence, designed to draw gasps from an audience who never dreamed they’d see their heroes once again on the big-screen, is a perfect rosetta stone for The Flash and other films like it – it is a flimsy reconstruction, a wax figurine of a better work (or a real person), a distant reminder of a time when blockbusters had a heart and a soul. 

The Flash is in cinemas now.

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE