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*½/**** starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton screenplay by Christina Hodson directed by Andy Muschietti
by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.
Miller’s on-screen persona in The Flash is a sort of nerd everyman, animated by hair-trigger enthusiasms and idioglossia. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino acquired a superpower and it’s close to nailing Miller’s schtick here as well as a good barometer for one’s personal tolerance of the Barry Allen character. In this iteration, the Flash figures out he can run fast enough to travel not only through time but also across parallel universes–and, in so doing, perhaps accomplish the dangerous trick Superman pulls off in Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) of turning the clock back far enough to save a loved one. Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú) is the loved one in question, murdered while his dad (Ron Livingston) is at the store fetching a forgotten can of tomatoes. He’s accused of killing her anyway, thus essentially orphaning Barry at a very immature 18. But what if Barry slips a can of tomatoes into his mom’s cart on that fateful day? Easy peasy, right? Well, if you’ve read your Ray Bradbury, you know that any manipulation of the past, however tiny, may result in extraordinary upset in the future. What this means in The Flash is that Barry meets Barry and must teach him how to be the Flash. General Zod (Michael Shannon) invades Earth in a timeline where Superman doesn’t make it, but his cousin Supergirl (Sasha Calle) does. And Batman isn’t the Ben Affleck Batman of the Justice League franchise but rather Michael Keaton from the Tim Burton movies that started this superhero renaissance all those years ago. Crazy, right? Also, the way The Flash visualizes quantum possibilities is as a kind of stadium straight out of the Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death, allowing for such absolute atrocities as the shoddily reanimated corpse of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to stand atop a building and gaze, dead-faced and glassy-eyed, upon the numerous possible timelines.
It’s fucked-up. Also fucked-up is a scene 10 minutes in where, after a distended extrapolation of what the nursery sequence from Hard-Boiled might play like were it fed to Video Toaster, the Flash tells the traumatized victim of a major disaster, “I understand that these events can be psychologically scarring. You should seek the services of a mental-health professional. The Justice League is not very good at that part yet. Trust me.” Rimshot! Do you get it? Barry is telling this extremely upset person they need to get some help and then making the self-deprecating joke that the organization to which he belongs isn’t very good at providing said help. This is bad, no matter how you slice it. If it was part of the original script, it should’ve been cut, given how it ends up making light of Miller’s well-publicized “hurting other people” freakout. If it was added in post to make light of Miller’s well-publicized “hurting other people” freakout, it’s deeply insensitive. Either way, it’s shit that awful humans do when they’re more interested in making a buck and scoring a point than in the victims of their prize ponies, or the show horses themselves. It’s disgusting. But if you have a strong stomach, the rest of the first hour is essentially about Barry trying to grow up and show up to his job, maybe start a little something with rival reporter Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), and prepare for his dad’s sentencing for a crime he didn’t commit. I like how this part feels melancholy and doomed, because either it’s working for the character or it’s working for how Ezra Miller’s life bleeds into my watching of this thing. Barry needs to cut the shit before he loses everything. Ezra Miller does, too.
I maintain that Keaton is the screen’s best Batman while the best Bruce Wayne belongs to Affleck, who does materialize in The Flash and has an affecting moment where Barry offers to go back in time to save Bruce’s parents. Bruce says that our stories make us who we are, so it’s better to live in the present than in the past. I’m sad we won’t get more time with Affleck in this role; I suspect the character is actually pretty close to who Affleck really is: sharp, taciturn, and a little weary of this world. There’s a strange detail where Barry has that Raquel Welch One Million Years B.C. poster on his wall–the last poster Andy uses to cover his escape hole in The Shawshank Redemption and a tribute now to a recently-passed icon. He phases through it, Barry does, right before he finally decides to go into the past to change his parents’ fate. He’s escaping his reality for the hope of another one–a hope that proves both faint and potentially apocalyptic. And then The Flash itself falls apart, becoming another endless punch-fest with poor CGI produced by overtaxed artists on impossible timelines of their own. Not even the nostalgic thrill of Keaton returning as Bats can compensate for the ironic lack of imagination in a movie about infinite possibilities. The last few minutes of the film are good again, though, as Barry realizes he can’t change certain canonical events (see also: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and settles instead for a sweet goodbye in the grocery aisles. There’s a lovely message in The Flash, in other words, buried in poisonous metatext, corporate greed, and the need to honour a franchise that was dead on arrival. This is the story of a kid who’s fed to a voracious machine without much thought about the kid. It’s an American tragedy, and we’re all playing a part in it.
