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Watch The Flash with a subscription on Max, Netflix, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

The Flash is funny, fittingly fast-paced, and overall ranks as one of the best DC movies in recent years.

The Flash has enough heart, humor, and action -- not to mention fun cameos -- to make up for any drawbacks.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Andy Muschietti

Ezra Miller

Barry Allen

Michael Keaton

Bruce Wayne

Sasha Calle

Kara Zor-El

Michael Shannon

General Zod

Ron Livingston

Henry Allen

Movie Clips

More like this, related movie news.

One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, “The Flash” is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It features some of the best digital FX work I’ve seen and some of the worst. Like its sincere but often hapless hero, it keeps exceeding every expectation we might have for its competence only to instantly face-plant into the nearest wall. 

Then it hits the reset button and starts again—which, come to think of it, is what “The Flash” keeps doing over and over again narratively, with time, parallel universes, and the question of whether “canonical” events in the life of a person or a whole dimension can be altered. From start to finish, it suffers the double misfortune of being its own worst enemy, despite real thoughtfulness and an intriguingly unstable cocktail of genres (slapstick comedy, family drama, heavy metal action flick, philosophically driven science fiction adventure); and also arriving on screens right after the release of “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse,” a high watermark for both superhero movies and major studio animated features that explores most of the same concepts as “The Flash” in a more aesthetically innovative way. 

Ezra Miller , whose  offscreen brushes with the law  make some of the film’s raunchier comedy land poorly, stars as twentysomething forensic scientist and secret superhero Barry Allen, who feels like the “janitor” of the Justice League and is still grappling with the impact of his mother’s murder and his father’s wrongful imprisonment for the crime. Here, again, in this very review, we encounter a double bind characteristic of “The Flash”: it’s poor form to discuss the meatier parts of the movie because you can’t do that without describing the plot in detail, and yet at the same time, a lot of it has already been “spoiled,” not just on social media and online forums but in the film’s own trailers and marketing material (Warner Bros. supplied the photo at the top of this review) and on Wikipedia. If you read all that, you know whether to keep going or put the rest of this piece aside for later.  

For those still reading: Remember the ending of the original 1978 “Superman: The Movie,” where Christopher Reeve’s Superman has to choose between stopping a nuclear missile headed for Miss Tesmacher’s home state and preventing his great love Lois Lane from getting killed by an earthquake, tries to do both, loses Lois, then turns back time to resurrect her? Well, that sequence has been expanded into an entire film and merged with the “ Back to the Future ” series, courtesy of Barry’s decision to try to go back in time and change one detail on the day his family was destroyed. Mom ( Maribel Verdú ) sent Dad ( Ron Livingston ) to the local supermarket to fetch a can of tomatoes she needed for a recipe. When little Barry hears a commotion and comes downstairs, he finds Mom on the kitchen floor with a knife jammed into her bloody chest and Dad weeping over her corpse with one hand on the hilt. Barry surmises that he can use his Flash powers to return to that fateful day, add a can of tomatoes to Mom’s supermarket basket, and save both parents. Anybody who’s seen a time travel movie (or read Ray Bradbury’s short story The Sound of Thunder ) knows it’s not that simple.

Directed by Andy Muschietti (“ Mama ,” both “ It ” movies), from a script by ace genre screenwriter  Christina Hodson (“Birds of Prey,” “ Bumblebee “), “The Flash” deserves credit for taking its ideas and the pain of its characters seriously without devolving into glum, colorless machismo. When Miller enters what he believes is “the past” (it’s actually an alternate timeline), he not only encounters another version of himself with an intact, happy family but befriends and mentors the other Barry, discovering along the way how annoying he can be to others. 

Muschietti over-directs the pre-time-travel version of Barry, emphasizing his anxiety, clumsiness, and facial tics to the point where he seems like one of those schlemiels that Jerry Lewis used to play. But once the original Barry teams up with the other Barry, Miller keeps the schlemiel energy high for the second Barry while dialing it down for the original. This lets the first Barry mature in increments, part of the traditional arc of a young hero. The film showcases its finest effects in these mirror-image duets. The result is the most convincing instance of a leading man playing opposite himself since Michael Fassbender in “ Alien: Covenant .” The shots of both Barrys even have a smidge of handheld shakiness that’s visual shorthand for “authenticity.” Within a scene or two, you’ll likely forget that it’s one actor playing the same part and instead focus on what Miller does with both incarnations of the character. 

The master narrative of the DCEU defines Superman’s city-leveling battle with General Zod in “ Man of Steel ” as a character- and team-defining canonical event for every interlinked feature film in the series. The aftermath of that contest figured into the plots and dialogue of more than one film, most notably “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” When it’s referenced again in the film’s first act, you know Barry and Barry will have to deal with it again in another universe. Sure enough, here comes Zod with his villainous teammates, scarab starships, armored shock troopers, and terraforming World Engine. 

The problem is, there’s no Justice League to team up against him, and only one superhero: the Caped Crusader. Not Ben Affleck’s grizzled, Frank Miller-y Batman, but the one played by Michael Keaton in the 1980s Tim Burton films. Only he’s older, more haggard, and even more alienated from the society he monitors. As the time-ripened version of Burton’s Batman, essentially Bruce Wayne fused with the long-haired hermit incarnation of Howard Hughes, Keaton gives the movie’s subtlest performance. He underplays and reacts in a way that adds freshness to a story that’s probably too dependent on recycled situations and makes Miller’s jumpy, abrasive tendencies easier to take. He’s the acting version of a shock absorber, smoothing the ride without slowing it down. 

Barry, Barry, and Bruce become convinced that this universe’s Superman is trapped in a Siberian prison run by Russian mercenaries and fly there to bust him out. Turns out he’s a she: Kara Zor-El, Kal-El’s cousin, aka Supergirl ( Sasha Calle , rocking a modified pixie cut and a killer stare). Superman, we’re told, might still be out there somewhere, but his cousin (who was sent to protect him) is a powerful ally who can stand up to Zod. When the modified four-person Justice League substitute confronts Zod’s invading army, the movie proves that its obsessive referencing of the “Back to the Future” films was not just a running gag.

The reimagining of Zod’s attack is this movie’s equivalent of the end of the second “BTTF” movie, where time-traveling adolescent Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox in our world, and in Barry’s by Eric Stoltz , the actor Fox replaced!) had to attend the same prom that ended the original “BTTF” while avoiding a potentially time/space disruptive encounter with himself. (This movie’s decisions about what to save and what to delete from real world history are weird; I’d love to hear the logic behind erasing a lot of the DCEU superheroes from the second Barry’s universe while determining that “Back to the Future,” “Footloose,” and “ Top Gun ” and the first Chicago album were immutable occurrences.)

The film’s big battle is its least convincing sequence (parts of it look like cutscenes from an early-aughts game). It’s too bad, because it’s the most thought-provoking: as Batman and the Flashes and Supergirl battle Zod, the two Barrys disagree on whether traveling back and forth along dimensional pathways will solve problems or add new ones. Like most science fiction with even the thinnest veneer of seriousness, “The Flash” connects back to the godmother of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus . Shelley warned readers that using science to mimic God or defy nature has bad consequences, and it’s better for the story’s Prometheus figure to give up his illusions than continue traveling a ruinous path. Is this the sort of film that will heed Shelley’s warning, or ignore it to give the hero what he wants and the audience the wish-fulfillment fantasies it craves and that superhero films nearly always endorse? Even the first two Reeve Superman films erred on the side of audience wish-fulfillment; the first film lets him turn back time, while the second has him erase Lois’ knowledge of his secret identity with a super-kiss. “The Flash” deserves credit for threading the eye of that needle, giving audiences a somewhat hopeful ending without negating the philosophical and scientific issues it raises elsewhere. 

Unfortunately, “The Flash” also has a countervailing tendency that undermines its best self. Even as it cleverly translates Shelley’s worries into contemporary comic book terms, it serves up callback after fan-wanking callback to other versions of heroes and villains from film and TV, seemingly with no other purpose than to burnish Warner Bros’ properties and make the audience point to the screen and whisper the names of actors, characters, films, TV shows, and comic books that they recognize. Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Flash, Flash, Flash, etc., keep popping up scenes set in the “Chrono-Bowl,” a cosmic switching station with a design that alludes to clockwork gears, the concentric rings of chopped-down trees, theater-in-the-round, and a tribunal. 

And rather than find an artful, modest way to repurpose library footage from earlier adaptations of DC comics—as, say, “In the Line of Fire” did with footage of a younger Clint Eastwood from “ Dirty Harry “—the actors who originally played them, many of whom died long ago, have been scanned (or rebuilt) as vaguely three-dimensional but uncanny grotesques, like Madame Tussaud’s wax figures laid over audio-animatronic puppets. Remember the process that “reanimated” Peter Cushing in “Star Wars: Rogue One,” and later served up an even more unsettling “young Carrie Fisher ” in the climax, paving the way for a nearly expressionless “young Mark Hamill ” on “The Mandalorian,” and de-aged ’70s movie stars for various legacy sequels? It gets trotted out and multiplied ad nauseam here, even though the technology hasn’t improved much. 

The film’s principal cast also gets the zombie CGI treatment in the Chrono-Bowl, to visualize alternate realities. Some of the versions of these real, living actors with SAG cards and regularly updated IMDb pages look faintly demonic. The torsos and hands aren’t anatomically credible. One has eyes that point in opposite directions like a gecko. Were the deadlines rushed and the digital effects artists exploited until quality control disappeared— a problem throughout the entertainment industry —or is the technology just not there yet? And even if it ever does “get there,” will it ever not seem one (digital) step removed from wrapping a mannequin in corpse-flesh? Doing this sort of thing in a purely animated format moots such concerns. Everything in an animated comics adaptation is a drawing inspired by other drawings, and therefore a representation of a thing that is not meant to seem “real.” Not so in live-action. “Hey, that’s Actor X!” gives way to, “He looks kinda creepy and unreal,” and the spell is broken.

What a mess. And what a shame, because what’s good about “The Flash” is very good. The movie puts a lot of thought into what it wants to say and not enough into how it says it. It avidly warns against a thing while at the same time doing a version of that same thing. Barry, driven by a desire to resurrect the dead, grapples with the ethics and advisability of actions that the film constantly performs, in small ways and large, without breaking a sweat.  

Opens Friday, June 16th.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Ezra Miller as Barry Allen / The Flash
• Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El / Supergirl
• Michael Shannon as General Zod
• Ron Livingston as Henry Allen
• Maribel Verdú as Nora Allen
• Kiersey Clemons as Iris West
• Antje Traue as Faora-Ul
• Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne / Batman
• Ian Loh as Young Barry Allen
• Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Patty Spivot
• Rudy Mancuso as Albert Desmond
• Andy Muschietti
• Benjamin Wallfisch
• Christina Hodson

Cinematographer

• Henry Braham
• Jason Ballantine
• Paul Machliss

Writer (story by)

• Joby Harold

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Metacritic reviews

• 70 Polygon Joshua Rivera Polygon Joshua Rivera It’s a bright, breezy film that is overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a bunch of movies that never really worked out.
• 67 Consequence Liz Shannon Miller Consequence Liz Shannon Miller There’s an immense amount of baggage weighing down what proves to be a vaguely competent superhero adventure, albeit one that fails to add anything significant to the genre by the end.
• 67 IndieWire Kate Erbland IndieWire Kate Erbland In its best moments, The Flash touches on something new and exciting, but too often, its the past that tugs on, keeping it from speeding ahead.
• 63 Slant Magazine Justin Clark Slant Magazine Justin Clark Nothing Batman or Supergirl do in The Flash to save the world is more effective than what Barry Allen does to save it with a hug and a can of tomatoes.
• 60 Total Film Kevin Harley Total Film Kevin Harley Muschietti directs confidently, notably in an opening sequence that betters both Justice Leagues for fun. What’s less persuasive is the CGI, an eyesore that’s particularly gaudy when the finale’s ‘secrets’ drop.
• 60 ScreenCrush Matt Singer ScreenCrush Matt Singer The good barely outweighs the bad here, at least enough for me to give The Flash a marginal recommendation. A lot of the reviews of The Flash from early screenings called it one of the greatest DC Comics movies ever made. Maybe in another universe that’s true. In this one, I thought it stumbled across the finish line.
• 58 Collider Ross Bonaime Collider Ross Bonaime Cameos and fan service are fine to have, but the story has to be there to back them up, and it’s not quite there with The Flash.
• 49 TheWrap William Bibbiani TheWrap William Bibbiani It’s hard to imagine a film with less strength of conviction than The Flash, a time travel movie about why it’s bad to retcon the past, but which exists entirely to convince the audience that retconning the past, present and (potentially) the future of the DC superhero franchise is a super cool thing to do.
• 40 Screen Rant Molly Freeman Screen Rant Molly Freeman The Flash is a passable multiverse superhero movie, but no amount of DC cameos can make audiences forget the awful off-screen actions of Ezra Miller.
• 40 The Guardian Peter Bradshaw The Guardian Peter Bradshaw Some entertaining moments can’t hide the fact that this latest product of the DC Comics universe doesn’t exactly fly past.
• See all 55 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for The Flash

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The Flash Review

Flashback to the future..

The Flash premieres in theaters on June 16, 2023.

Fresh, funny, and fast – The Flash is a good time at the movies. Director Andy Muschietti’s clear love of the character anchors the many refreshingly unique action scenes and twisty time-travel plot, never losing sight of Barry Allen’s powerful emotional journey. Though the story doesn’t necessarily justify its excessive fan service and the third act is a bit unwieldy, that doesn’t stop The Flash from being an earnest and entertaining superhero film – and one of the better efforts from DC in recent memory.

In a loose adaptation of the Flashpoint comic event that feels like a more focused version and worthy update to the 2011 source material, Barry rushes to use his newfound time-travel ability to undo the most traumatic event of his life: the murder of his mother when he was a child. Using Back to the Future-esque time travel rules, The Flash becomes a tale of two Barry Allens, two Batmans, and two versions of DC movie continuities colliding. What follows is a sincere and surprisingly humorous morality play where Barry must reconcile what his selfish, grief-stricken actions have wrought. It’s especially effective in telling a story that includes the Flash’s full origin without actually being a typical origin story movie.

It’s impressive that it still manages to get all of that across, because for a film called The Flash, there sure is a lot of Batman in it. Even though it indulges in unnecessarily long Batman action sequences and numerous overt references to the Tim Burton Batman films, they never overshadow Barry’s story. The two Batmans are contrasted to excellent effect to accent Barry’s plight, with Ben Affleck’s Dark Knight lamenting that scars shouldn’t be undone because they make us who we are, and Michael Keaton’s Caped Crusader admitting there is an allure to the idea of being able to undo all that pain. As men orphaned by violence as children they have a lot in common and thus provide Barry with juicy philosophical food for thought. For his part, Affleck seems more at home as Batman and Bruce Wayne than ever with a ( very likely final ) performance that’s all business and sadness with a perfectly measured dash of dry humor.

Keaton, on the other hand, portrays an aged Bruce with an understated performance – too understated, at some points, almost as if he’s reluctant to rattle off his character’s most memorable lines (and some not-so-memorable ones seemingly just for the heck of it) for the nostalgia-hungry crowd. Keaton’s action scenes are the exact opposite, as we watch his Batman fight like never before thanks to modern special effects. On one hand, it’s cool to see him fling Batarangs and glide around like a bat out of Hell, but it’s also overly cartoonish when we all know that Keaton is in his 70s. It's enough to make you question why we'd ever need Batman Beyond when Senior Citizen Batman can kick that much ass. It feels like a missed opportunity to not acknowledge and explore how an older Bruce can still be Batman despite his age, especially because there's precious little substance to his character or motivation to begin with.

The Flash Trailer Images

Unfortunately, the Supergirl we meet in this mashed-up world feels more like a plot device than a fully fleshed-out character, and it’s sad to watch as her part in the story veers into cringey cliche territory. That said, actor Sasha Calle shines as much as she can given the thin nature of the role, and manages to make an impression with her disillusioned Kara Zor-El, who holds an understandable grudge against humanity.

All of those characters play major roles, but this is the first time we’ve seen Barry in a movie centered around him, and Muschietti takes care to showcase the hero’s signature powers in true blockbuster fashion. Whereas Zack Snyder rendered super speed in slow motion, Muschietti makes you feel the Gs from the the first time Flash strikes his admittedly dorky sprinting pose and takes off.

At times, there’s an uncomfortable (yet silly) intimacy in how the Flash’s powers are depicted. We quickly see that having that kind of speed isn’t as easy as it looks, and learning how Barry navigates things like friction heat and what happens to your clothes when you phase through solid matter gives you an appreciation for how clever and resourceful he is. The Quicksilver sequence in X-Men: Days of Future Past remains the king of slow-motion speedster sequences, but The Flash offers up a new one that certainly gets credit for its inventiveness. It’s a frankly ridiculous situation, but that doesn’t stop it from having genuine moments of horror among the humorous ones.

While a majority of the visual effects are superb, one in particular is not. Time travel is portrayed using a concept unlike anything we’ve seen before – and credit where it’s due for that originality – but when this “chrono bowl” (yes, that’s what they call it) depicts people, they look like eerie wax dolls with plastic hair, as if the CGI render was shut off halfway through. Given that a handful of important scenes take place there, and they ask for a lot of emotional investment from us, the distracting look ends up robbing certain big moments of their intended impact. Let's just say it didn’t bowl me over.

It’s obvious going in that The Flash deals with time travel, but nothing can quite prepare you for the blast from the past that is returning to the era of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel from 2013. It feels strange revisiting these events 10 years later, yet that ends up working to The Flash’s advantage as Barry begins to notice how things have changed in this timeline. In ways big and small, this story feels like a parting love letter to the Snyderverse, as it plays with the many toys the DCEU has introduced over the years and adds a new layer to that foundational film, and in doing so expands on Barry’s superhero journey in a profound way. Only James Gunn and Peter Safran know what’s in store for the future of the DC Universe, but if this is truly the last in-universe chapter of the Snyderverse as we know it then it’s a fitting swan song because it brings things full circle. (Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is technically part of the Snyderverse but comes after what Gunn described as a “reset” of the DC Universe in The Flash .)

Who is your favorite speedster?

All of this leads up to one of the most ambitious and unwieldy third acts we’ve seen in a superhero movie in quite some time. The amount of chaos – both in action and storytelling – that unfolds threatens to overwhelm and confuse, and at times it does, but it ultimately succeeds because it manages to keep Barry’s arc at the heart of it all.

That’s owed to the fact that Barry Allen is the most impressive part of The Flash, and why it all works so well. By having Barry meet his younger self, a version of him who was never traumatized the way he was, it helps us better understand what makes him tick and where his peculiar personality comes from. Barry doesn’t start off as the most likable character, but by the end it’s hard not to root for him. We see the ways in which grief affected his life, from his non-existent social life to the way he defies the system at his forensics job to ensure proper justice is carried out.

Actor Ezra Miller excels in this double role, offering two dramatically different looks at the same character. One of the most affecting scenes of the film is just Barry having a passionate argument with his younger self. Muschietti brings in a delightful, off-beat sense of humor and Miller proves they have the comedic chops to deliver it, taking all-too-familiar superhero story ideas and upending them into laugh-out-loud moments or creative action scenes. Yet the superhero theatrics are all in service of an intimate story about the pain of grief and the strength it takes to find acceptance, and in those moments of vulnerability Miller shines just as bright.

The Flash is an ambitious superhero movie that largely pulls off its tale of two worlds, two Flashes, and two Batmans. The superhero fan service is strong with this one – perhaps too strong at times – but it never fully overshadows Barry Allen’s genuinely tragic and heartfelt story of grief. Though the visual effects aren’t always the best and the third act is a bit overwhelming, strong performances and a refreshing earnestness keep The Flash on track and running circles around many of the recent DC Universe movies. If this is the truly last stop on the Snyderverse express, then it’s a respectable way to go out.

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The Flash is a eulogy for every DC movie that never was

DC runs a victory lap in a race against itself

by Joshua Rivera

For a movie about a guy who can move incomprehensibly fast, The Flash sure did arrive late. Originally planned for a 2016 release, according to a 2013 DC movie plan that ultimately proved too ambitious, The Flash arrives a full decade later from a chastened DC that’s getting ready to restart its cinematic universe with James Gunn in charge . In 2023, The Flash now serves as one of the final films in the Snyderverse , a eulogy for the Zack Snyder era of DC — but also, surprisingly, for all DC’s page-to-screen adaptations. The result is messy and strange: It’s a bright, breezy film that is overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a bunch of movies that never really worked out.

Given all this, the worst thing a movie called The Flash could do is feel slow. To its credit, the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour run time moves at an impressive clip. This is even more astonishing given that it has one of the most convoluted plots in a recent stretch of superhero films that are absolutely lousy with multiversal exposition. While it lacks the clarity or resonance of, say, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse , Christina Hodson’s script keeps the story squarely focused on its protagonist’s emotional journey and treats the finer points of its metaphysical world-building as flavor, an excuse to do some extremely comic book things.

The opening briefly reestablishes Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) as a part-time Justice League member and full-time forensics lab analyst on a personal journey to clear the name of his father, Henry (Ron Livingston), who’s been convicted of murdering Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú). The plot kicks into gear when Barry learns that the last big potential break in his dad’s case will not exonerate him. In a moment of anguish, Barry discovers that if he runs fast enough, he can surpass the speed of light and travel through time, observing history in a ring of space-time he calls “the chronobowl.” Ignoring a warning from Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) about the perils of altering history, Barry decides to time travel to prevent his mother’s murder and his father’s imprisonment.

In spite of this angst-fueled premise, director Andy Muschietti ( It and It: Chapter Two ) smartly infuses the film with a Looney Tunes sensibility, reintroducing Barry with one of the goofiest opening sequences in a superhero film to date, and using the time-travel premise to make The Flash a buddy comedy, pairing Barry with a younger, more obnoxious version of himself from the past.

Most of the film takes place in a new timeline Barry creates, where the decision to save his mother ripples outward to create a version of the DC movie universe with no metahumans, on the brink of its foundational disaster: General Zod (Michael Shannon) arriving as he did in 2013’s Man of Steel , but this time, with no one to stop him. Barry is forced to recreate his superhero origin with his younger self, and to team up with the only known superhero in this timeline: Batman, but the one played by Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman and its sequel.

This is where The Flash stops being a movie and instead becomes several other things, some of them outright cynical. There is the blatant nostalgia play in making Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman the film’s biggest supporting character — a role Keaton, to his credit, does not phone in. Yet The Flash doesn’t stop there. Like Barry, the filmmakers run too far, too fast, and too wild, until their film nearly spirals out of their control in a confused tangle of meta-commentary and eulogy, contemplating the history of DC movie adaptations as well as the Snyderverse that began it, and that’s coming to a close shortly. (There’s still a second Aquaman movie and Blue Beetle on the way before Gunn’s universe, labeled the DCU, kicks off.)

In pivoting from time-travel caper into multiversal doomsday epic, Muschietti treats Barry’s emotional arc of acceptance less as the heart of The Flash , and more like its bookends, an experience Barry grows from in the hopes that the audience will also find it worthwhile. But so much of the substance of The Flash isn’t for Barry. It’s for the DC stalwarts who’ll get all the meta nods and in-jokes. The movie is a chronicle of corporate synergy, mashing together the old and new in an attempt to lure DC fans from across generations, with the assumption that meaning will emerge from mere recognition.

What’s so peculiar about The Flash ’s version of the multiverse shenanigans that have now taken place across three Spider-Man films, an entire Marvel animated TV series , and a Doctor Strange sequel is that so much of it leans on its audience knowing what might have been, and still craving it. It’s a film full of wistful what-ifs. What if Michael Keaton stayed on as the definitive movie Batman? How would he fit into the modern landscape? What if the Snyderverse wasn’t coming to an end as the James Gunn era of DC begins to lay its plans? What if The Flash could be free of having to address the controversy surrounding star Ezra Miller , and a bankable franchise could be built on their frankly bighearted and earnest performance?

The Flash is a bright, colorful, imaginative film with enough verve to pop off the screen, even though it’s often nonsensical in its wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. But as fun as its imagery can be, it also signals the same priorities Muschietti showed in the It movies. So much of The Flash gives way to computer-generated effects, not just for the depiction of super-people fighting to save the world — Sasha Calle puts in a rage-fueled performance as Supergirl, even though the film leaves her with frustratingly little to do — but for its longing glances at alternate possible pasts, as Barry travels through time and space to see what might have been.

In these glances, the audience is shown a computerized guernica of faces and characters they know, or might have known. Yet disconcertingly, almost none of those familiar faces and familiar properties are played by real people. They’re just likenesses. Brands. A reward to the faithful who have actively followed not just the DC stories that came out in theaters, but the ones that almost did. In this, The Flash is the biggest, the ultimate DC comics movie. And it feels so much smaller for it.

The Flash opens in theaters on June 16.

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The Flash Review

14 Jun 2023

It’s taken – in a supreme act of Alanis-ing – so long for The Flash to get his own movie that the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe has changed on several occasions. Now that it has arrived, we should address the elephant in the room: yes, Barry Allen does enter the Speed Force.

There’s another elephant in the room, of course: the off-screen behaviour of the film’s star, Ezra Miller, which has often threatened to overshadow the movie. On the thorny issue of separating art from the artist, your mileage may vary, but purely on a performance level, Miller is excellent here. There was a tendency for the actor in  Justice League , particularly the Joss Whedon version, to mug relentlessly as the film’s appointed comic relief. Here, Miller benefits from the decision to have not one, but two Barry Allens, which allows the role of jester to go to the younger, more carefree Barry, while the Alpha-Barry gets to learn and grow and glare contemptuously at his idiotic younger self. We spend much of the movie with this dynamic duo, and they’re a joy together, as Beta-Barry gets to grips with entering the Speed Force, phasing through walls, and running around in the nud.

There’s been a lot of focus on the return of Michael Keaton as Batman, but director Andy Muschietti — stepping away from horror after  Mama  and both chapters of  It  — makes sure that this is a Flash movie. The breathless first 20 minutes serve as a mini-sequel to  Justice League , bringing Barry and Ben Affleck’s Batman together, before Barry — still hurting from the loss of his murdered mother — hurtles back through time.

Keaton fits right back into the Batsuit again, providing a pleasingly cranky contrast to both Barrys.

Naturally, as Batfleck warns, the cure is worse than the condition, stranding Barry in the past with the dawning realisation that fings ain’t wot they used to be. This includes the morphing of Affleck into Keaton, and much talk of Multiverses (aided by a helpful demonstration involving spaghetti, although they could have just bunged on  Spider-Man: No Way Home  instead). It’s been over 30 years since  Batman Returns , and while there is a tendency to use Keaton to dispense a quick nostalgia hit (Danny Elfman’s  Batman  theme plays seemingly on a loop), he fits right back into the Batsuit again, providing a pleasingly cranky contrast to both Barrys. That can’t really be said, sadly, for the third superhero in the mix, who is introduced far too late to make much impact.

Interestingly, there isn’t really an antagonist. Although Michael Shannon’s General Zod does appear, Muschietti keeps him at arm’s length, recognising that he has all the conflict he could ever need in his guilt-ridden hero. It’s a blockbuster, of course, and by the end there’s CG carnage aplenty, but refreshingly the emphasis remains on Barry, a boy who has been running from the moment his mum was murdered, and who finally starts to realise that it might be time to stop.

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