Is The Flash Running on Empty?

Is The Flash Running on Empty?

DC’s latest blockbuster attempt is an entertaining spectacle, but misses every opportunity to have real depth

by Josh McNamee

Warning: This review may contain mild spoilers for The Flash.

Credit is surely due to Andy Muschietti for getting this one over the line; indeed, Warner Bros. has already shown that no good deed goes unpunished by proudly assigning him the thankless task of rebooting Batman yet again. Conceived in the eye-wateringly distant past of 2016, The Flash has spent years being buffeted by corporate winds and the many varied scandals spawned by its lead actor, Ezra Miller (Miller is no stranger to propping up tortured franchises, having appeared in three Fantastic Beasts movies). Despite having seen the DC cinematic franchise projects built around it falter and fall twice over now, the movie has arrived relatively intact.

Indeed, The Flash has not suffered the fate of so many cinematic boondoggles: it’s not a complete mess. It has a beginning, middle, and (something of) an end, though the proportions of each can’t be said to be particularly balanced. And the film puts its best foot forward, starting with a comedic action sequence where Miller’s Flash has to slow time to save a gallery of babies falling to their doom from a collapsing hospital. It’s deeply, darkly funny and revels in the potential black humor of the situation—an underfed Barry runs past a falling baby to steal from a vending machine, an all-too-canny Barry protects a baby from a jet of flame by ensconcing it in a microwave. Barry lamely tries to console a traumatized nurse. It’s a humor that comes out in all the best parts of the film, most notably when an aging Michael Keaton agrees to Barry’s plan to recreate the circumstances by which he gained his powers: Keaton plays it like he’s a latter-day Dr. Frankenstein, just happy to have the opportunity to shock someone.

Miller, despite their many reported crimes, is on form playing both the early-career Flash and the college Flash. The two Barries have a surprising amount of chemistry, are different but recognizably the same character, and keep the jokes light and funny—the “He’s Batman?!” moment that the trailers so thoroughly drove into the ground works in context. It’s enough to let you understand why Warner Bros. hasn’t erased them from history yet, though with the reported box office failure of this film that may still come to pass.

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The greatest potential for The Flash is sadly squandered, that being the idea that (intentionally or otherwise) a DC film was going to return to and confront the ideas raised by 2013’s Man of Steel. Even Zack Snyder’s direct sequels to that film shied away from considering the questions of free will and free choice raised by that film, preferring instead to head off into the mythopoetics of gods and demons. The Flash is partly a creation of internal corporate reaction against that film (and those sequels), and so it seemed inevitable that by setting the climax of this film at the climax of Man of Steel—including bringing back Michael Shannon’s tremendous General Zod—Muschietti would invoke some thematic conflict with that film. The plot, a very loose adaptation of a bad comic called Flashpoint, is centered on time travel and so seems primed to lend itself to questions of destiny and fate. Even a very poor film could offer commentary in this way, as in 2017’s Justice League when the grinning face of a more positive, lighthearted Superman only serves to reintroduce the (erased) notion that resurrecting him was deeply wrong.

The tragedy of The Flash, then, is that despite being a better-made film than Justice League, it eschews any further development of such themes. Shannon and the supporting cast of villains from Man of Steel are squandered, given little to do other than play cardboard cutouts for the band of protagonists to bounce hits off. The moral quandaries of Man of Steel are tied off in a clean, bloodless fashion. Would Clark, raised as a Kryptonian, have adopted their fascist creed? We aren’t shown, as he died here as a child. Would his cousin Kara, suffering the torture at the hands of Earth people that Pa Kent labored to protect Clark from, be seduced by the offer of a new Krypton? The offer is never really made. The Kryptonians, brutally efficient and focused in that earlier film, here loaf about engaging in dogfighting and hand-to-hand combat to no apparent end. Flash never even attempts to halt the World Engine, the great terraforming tool that will erase all life on Earth.

The film is equally disinterested in confronting the psychosexual world of Tim Burton’s earlier Batman films. Michael Keaton’s character here maintains no pretense of being the same individual from those films, instead playing a mix of Doc Brown from Back to the Future and the stereotype of an old martial arts master. In fact, in keeping with the times, the film is almost entirely sexless—other than in the fetishistic reworking of Barry’s suit, which is awkward enough that the characters comment on it more than once. Even Marty McFly had the hots for his mom, but Barry Allen’s heartfelt longing for Iris West—last seen in a pitch-perfect cloud of hot dog sausages in Zack Snyder’s Justice League—is thoroughly stubbed out on the weird, lingering implication that she might just be a journalist working him for a quote. As mentioned above, Keaton brings tantalizing glimpses of himself as a proper weirdo to the role, but they’re only glimpses.

At the moment when the film needs to collapse down entirely to the two Barries and their world, their lives, it becomes a showreel for eighty years of superheroes on film.

Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s competing superhero epic currently in theaters, has many superficial similarities to The Flash. But the concept of a “multiverse” ultimately brings so little to the table that the comparisons fall flat. What similarity is there between a film that jumps through settings and characters, each more imaginative than the last, and a film that first locks itself into a gloomy mansion for the second act, and then to a nondescript wasteland for the last one? Where Spider-Verse tries to use its conceit to represent the diversity of life on Earth, the multiverse of The Flash ultimately delivers only ghosts—entire ghost planets colliding in the ether. Perceiving the idiosyncratic montage of past celebrities as a sort of Adam Curtis documentary in space, Barry decides that the world is too incoherent and uncontrollable to attempt to change it in any radical way. Resolving himself to his existing life, he has a moment of catharsis with the memory of his mother and goes back to mildly reforming the criminal justice system.

The problem is that despite being a film set in a world of infinite possibilities, and a film celebrating (or condemning) the choices of the past, The Flash is terrified of deviating from its own vision. It can’t inhabit the world of Man of Steel, it can’t imagine the world of Batman Returns; it can only be the buddy comedy about meeting your younger self and explaining to them that you’re a superhero. The saving grace of The Flash is that that film is actually pretty good, and pretty funny. The worst issue is the intrusion of all this other stuff: all these worlds and universes and the worst kind of self-referential “event comic” concepts. At the exact moment when the film needs to collapse down entirely to the two Barries and their world and lives, it becomes a showreel for eighty years of superheroes on film.

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That is how this iteration of the DC universe ends: with a comedy sting and a return to the status quo. It would be an utterly miserable ending, a Thor: Love and Thunder writ again, if it weren’t personal to Barry. It’s not that change isn’t possible, it’s just that he wasn’t able to figure it out and gave up.

Which is really the film in a nutshell. “We’ve tried everything,” Warner Bros. seem to be saying to us, “and so while we think this kinda sucks, at least it’s not nothing.”