The Flash Is a Two Hundred Million Dollar "Meh'

So it turns out the Ezra Miller Flash movie just kinda sucks

Well THAT was a disappointment. 

For months now The Flash has been a crisis. It’s been a moral quandary. It’s been a source of speculation and non-stop tabloid headlines related to star Ezra Miller’s colorful offscreen crime spree. 

The Ezra Miller Situation presented Warner Brothers and DC Studios with a unique dilemma: how do you launch a two hundred million dollar tentpole superhero movie when your star is giving out major Charles Manson vibes? 

How can audiences root for a thespian cast as a superhero when he’s known as a real life supervillain in the making?

The justification for releasing The Flash despite Ezra Miller’s exceedingly public travails is that it is REALLY good. James Gunn called The Flash "one of the best superhero movies [he's] ever seen.”

I call bullshit. As the head of DC Studios, Gunn has a distinct personal and professional investment in The Flash’s success. He’s the man in charge now and that inherently means less freedom to be candid than when he was a maverick and an outsider. 

The Flash has been many things to many people, most of them overwhelmingly negative but now this most troubled of productions is just a movie. 

That’s all it is. It’s a movie playing in theaters that people can choose to see or to avoid for any number of reasons creative, moral or otherwise. 

The Flash isn’t even a particularly good movie. After all of this time and all of this drama and all of this public conjecture DC Studios has released a feature film adaptation of The Flash that is unforgivably “meh.” 

The emotional core of The Flash is the lead character’s emotional bond with his mother. In superhero fashion, Miller’s Barry Allen was traumatized by the murder of his mom and his father going to jail for the crime despite being innocent. 

The Flash asks why a superhero capable of traveling back in time shouldn’t use that gift to prevent their formative trauma. As Ray Bradbury, the author of A Sound of Thunder would be happy to tell you, the problem with messing with the timeline is that tiny changes anywhere in the time-space continuum can have catastrophic, even world-destroying connotations. 

Barry knows deep down that he’s opening Pandora’s box by fucking with the timeline but the irrational dictates of the heart override the intellect and he travels back in time to keep his mother from getting murdered and his dad from doing time for the crime. 

The Butterfly Effect takes hold. By keeping his mother from dying Barry somehow creates an alternate timeline without meta-humans where Eric Stoltz rather than Michael J. Fox starred in Back to the Future, as originally planned. 

Oh, and all of this dicking around with the timeline results in Miller’s primary costar being themselves. That’s right: neurotic contemporary Barry Allen has a curious sidekick in his younger self, a surfer dude stoked to be on the super heroic adventure of a lifetime. 

Warner Brothers knows damn well that the public does not want to look at Ezra Miller right now. They know that they don’t want to be asked to identify with characters they’re playing and root for them to get the bad guys and emerge triumphant in the end. 

They know that merely seeing Miller’s handsomely androgynous visage can be triggering to people who have experienced abuse and manipulation at the hands of powerful, charismatic abusers and know all too well why Miller is in so much trouble that a lot of people thought The Flash would never be released despite its tremendous cost and potential. 

Yet the studio disastrously chose to double down and give us TWICE the Ezra Miller. Throughout The Flash we’re forced to look at two Ezra Millers, which is two more than folks are comfortable with right now. 

Gunn and DC Studios gambled that audiences would be so blown away by Miller’s work here and the film itself that they would be able to separate the art from the artist and the character from the actor. 

They foolishly hoped that the movie’s make-believe would be so potent and so convincing that it would wash away all that offscreen ugliness and toxicity in a great wave of old-fashioned superhero entertainment. 

They were wrong. Miller’s double life as a Jim Jones-like cult leader in the making never stops being a massive distraction from a labored endeavor that needs all the help it can get. 

To borrow a line from Krusty the Clown The Flash is most assuredly NOT the tightest TWO HOURS AND THIRTY SIX MINUTES in the biz. It’s nearly twenty minutes longer than Across the Spider-Verse, which feels half as long. 

The Flash has the cheap buzz of nostalgia going for it and an iconic performance from a legend of the field but it is otherwise a clattering, excessively busy mediocrity weighed down by some of the most surreally awful CGI I have ever seen. 

The filmmakers had hundreds of millions of dollars to realize their ambitions. So why does the CGI seem stuck at the level of The Lawnmower Man? Why do all of the computer generated babies in the film look like tattoos of people’s children that accidentally make them look like ghoulish monsters and mutants? 

Did the filmmakers also travel back in time and can’t use any technology beyond 2008? The Flash is committed to bringing the Uncanny Valley back in ways not seen since Polar Express. 

The two versions of Barry Allen/The Flash in this alternate 2013 learn that General Zod (Michael Shannon) is coming to earth to look for Superman with malice on his mind. 

I love Shannon. He is a wonderful character actor, a Christopher Walken-like eccentric and a straight shooting good guy. But he stops just short of making a jerk off gesture after every line of dialogue to broadcast his complete disinterest in the role and the film and the whole stupid world of DC Films. 

General Zod should be iconic. Instead he comes off as a half-hearted afterthought, in no small part because Shannon is barely in the film. Barry Allen/The Flash tries to put the Justice League back together but can’t find Wonder Woman and learns that Cyborg hasn’t become a superhero yet while Aquaman wasn’t born. 

The only luck he has is with a retired, elderly, neckerchief-loving Bruce Wayne played by a seventy year old Michael Keaton in a wonderful performance that is the film’s greatest strength and the only thing that justifies its existence, particularly in light of Miller’s offscreen misdeeds. 

As a Gen-Xer who read the Batman novelization before the movie even came out and worshipped Tim Burton I had powerful emotional reaction to seeing Keaton return to the role after thirty-one years away. 

Keaton’s Bruce Wayne in retirement has a gloriously autumnal sartorial style I would describe as a cross between The Big Lebowski and late period Peter Bogdanovich. 

The Flash knows what we want and panders accordingly. If, like me you, you have waited long decades to hear Michael Keaton utter the words “I’m Batman” or propose getting nuts then The Flash has what you need and only, unfortunately, what you need. 

Keaton’s Batman has a bit of a Batman Beyond vibe but more warmly paternal and less angry. The Flash only ever comes alive when he’s onscreen lending dignity and a certain gravitas for a clattering contraption of a blockbuster that desperately needs all it can get. 

Then Supergirl enters the fray and then, in a sequence I found appalling, sad and kind of impressive all at once we use CGI, Deep Fake and all manner of evil trickery to depict a multi-verse that contains versions of Superman throughout the years. 

George Reeves is resurrected. Poor bastard. I don’t think his angry ghost is going to see a penny from his appearance here. Christopher Reeve gets it next and then my man Nicolas Cage appears in the famous suit to shoot lasers at a spider monster.

Bringing back the dead for the sake of empty spectacle feels wrong on so many levels, as does making a prominent cast member of Batman & Robin return for a climactic surprise cameo. The filmmakers are trying everything to keep you from thinking about what Ezra Miller does offscreen. It doesn’t succeed. 

The Flash should have been shelved. It would have enjoyed a much more interesting life as one of pop culture’s great what ifs instead of being a profoundly disappointing reality. 

Two Stars out of Four