Racing into theaters after years of development hell, corporate shuffling, and other bad publicity, The Flash feels less like a feature film than a splashy event comic miniseries: It’s an editorially mandated story reverse engineered from bits of spectacle by an inconsistent creative team. Our hero Barry Allen is introduced as a distracted, perpetually snacking junior Justice Leaguer in a thrilling super-speed rescue set piece that nevertheless grinds to a halt for cameos from two of his superhero compatriots. Allen soon discovers that he can travel back in time and decides to prevent a family member’s grisly murder from his childhood. Controversial star Ezra Miller’s overstimulated performance is charming, but it’s not enough to resolve the tonal clash of the emotional stakes and the interdimensional plot, nor can they sustain a second role as a younger, even squirrelier version of Allen mid-origin story.
True to comics decades-deep in continuity, the film sprints through a remarkable number of sci-fi plot devices with little time for internal logic or emotional progression: phasing through walls, time paradoxes, alien invasions, four different Batmen. Michael Keaton’s return to the cowl drops the kinky, barely repressed mania of the Burton films in favor of incongruously badass hand-to-hand combat and a heroic death on a desert battlefield. At the film’s nadir, near its climax, Allen and his doppelgangers pause their conflict to gaze up at an alternate earth montage of past DC adaptations, including ghoulish renderings of three deceased actors and one Superman Easter egg tailor-made for nerds to explain to their significant others on the way out of the theater. The action scenes capture the scale of people with otherworldly powers, but it’s a cheap thrill, not genuine awe, like video game levels or, ahem, theme park rides. It’s ~150 minutes that go by quite slowly.
Originally published in the Chicago Reader.