by George Wood

With all the best will in the world, the odds were always going to be against The Flash being a good movie. The DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has largely been a failure in trying to form a cohesive creative direction, with The Flash already being dated on arrival by the announcement of James Gunn’s soft reboot of the franchise. The Flash also delivers a multiverse plot – the superhero topic du jour – less than two weeks after the almost universally acclaimed Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. And finally, The Flash has to squeeze in the origin story of the eponymous superhero, who has already been introduced in Batman v Superman and Justice League but not yet fully established among cinema audiences.

It is also impossible to ignore the offscreen controversies and public arrests of the lead carrying this movie. Ezra Miller has been accused of committing physical assault, harassment, and grooming minors, and it is uncomfortable to say the least to see a studio-led publicity drive for someone who has allegedly intimidated and victimised others and has had a very public breakdown in their mental health.

There are so many reasons to explain why The Flash was always going to be bad, but regardless of the reason, the final product is a mess. The Flash loosely adapts the 2011 crossover comic book arc, which itself was already adapted into the 2013 animated movie Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, and into the third season of The CW series The Flash. The basics here are that Barry Allen / The Flash finds his powers allow him to travel back in time and prevent his mother’s death, but ends up in an alternate reality without metahumans during the time period in which General Zod (Michael Shannon) invaded Earth (there are a lot of references to 2013’s Man of Steel here). To stop this event, Allen has to team up with a younger, more annoying version of himself, an older Batman / Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton, from the Tim Burton film timeline), and Kara Zor-El / Supergirl (Sasha Calle).

If you struggled following that synopsis, then that feeling is the film in a nutshell. Back to the Future gets referenced here a lot, but The Flash couldn’t be further Zemeckis’ classic in terms of narrative and tonal consistency. Yes I did laugh at some of the jokes (especially Barry’s realisation that he’s in an alternate reality because of Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly), yes I did get a thrill from hearing Danny Elfman’s 1989 Batman score, and yes I did enjoy seeing Michael Keaton play a grumpy old Bruce Wayne in a cravat and cardigan. But these occasionally good moments are stitched together with some of the most insipid dialogue and superhero clichés, with plot beats that make you think some of the script’s pages were missing.

What makes the film even worse is the sheer ugliness of it all. An early sequence sees Barry rescuing some babies that have fallen out of a hospital skyscraper. While it’s completely played for laughs, I was horrified by the grotesqueness of CGI faces plastered over these infant monstrosities. This blank, expressionless plastic imagery extends to other characters in the film, including Michael Shannon’s entire performance, and an onslaught of random, “fan favourite” cameos which have seemingly no bearing on anything else going on. If you thought the Doctor Strange multiverse scenes were bad, The Flash truly falls down the nostalgia bait abyss.

The film ends up being too strange to be boiled down to simple fan service, although there is a lot of that. The story is middling, the action is terrible, and franchise-wise the movie spends so much time setting up characters that seem to all be all but scrapped by Warner Bros. (including the Keaton-starring Batgirl film that was written off last year for tax purposes). It’s not the worst superhero film I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly one of the most aimless. In the end, I couldn’t help but question: what is this all for?

The Flash is out in cinemas now!