Having nothing else to do on Wednesday and not much capacity to do anything but watch TV, I went on “Max” to check out Ezra Miller in The Flash, just to see if it was AS bad as everybody said. And it’s not that bad… but it sure ain’t that good.
The movie starts with an amusing interlude with Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) pursuing criminals while they set The Flash (Miller) to save civilians from the property disaster the crooks set off as a distraction. It’s good, but the part where The Flash has to save eight babies (and a nurse, and a therapy dog) from falling out a skyscraper looks less like an ingenious use of superspeed and more like Adam West running an obstacle course to get rid of a bomb.
But Barry Allen’s other motivation besides being a superhero is to try to get his Dad out of prison. As a boy, Barry’s Mom sent his Dad to the store to get a can of tomatoes for dinner, and when he came home, he was found with a knife in his wife’s chest. Working with the Central City Police and secretly supported by Batman through Wayne Enterprises, Barry gets footage from the grocery store but it fails to give his Dad an alibi. But, Barry has learned from his power stunt in the Justice League movie that he can break the lightspeed barrier and travel spacetime. And of course, he tells Bruce Wayne (Batman) his idea, of course Bruce warns him about “The Butterfly Effect” and of course Barry blows him off. He tries to change the past on only the smallest level: He goes to the grocery store when his Mom first visits and plants a can of tomatoes in the shopping cart so she won’t forget it, so that Dad won’t be gone when a stranger comes by the house. And it works: Barry sees his Mom and his Dad together again, safe and sound. But he doesn’t realize that he hasn’t changed the past, he’s created a parallel timeline where there’s another Barry who’s about to visit his parents too.
For the sake of distinction I will henceforth refer to him as “Stoner Barry.” Stoner Barry has all the goofiness of regular Barry but none of the intellectual depth. See, this version of Barry didn’t see his Dad go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so he wasn’t motivated to develop a career in police forensics. That’s another point Bruce made to Barry in their conversation: “Our scars make us who we are.” (Also, our scars remind us that the past is real.) As it turned out not only did Barry go back to the point at which he would have gotten his powers in a lab accident, this is about the same time that the Kryptonian force under General Zod (Michael ‘I’m Only In It For The Money’ Shannon) came to demand the appearance of the last Kryptonian on Earth. So apparently deciding he hasn’t done ENOUGH damage to the timeline, Barry takes Stoner Barry to the police lab to repeat the incident that gave him the Speed Force, except that when he does so, lightning strikes him and then Stoner Barry so that Barry loses his powers but Stoner Barry gets them. So now Barry has to be the rational adult trying to show this goofball how to use his powers and the speedsuit.
In his web searches, Barry realizes that Victor Stone is not a cyborg in this timeline and Aquaman and Wonder Woman don’t even exist. But Stoner Barry’s roommates tell him Batman is real, he’s just been in retirement for years. So the two Barrys take a taxi to the dilapidated Wayne Manor and get in a fight with an old martial-artist hermit who turns out to be – Michael Keaton.
In not too much time, the boys convince this Bruce Wayne to shave his hair and beard and put on the rubber Batsuit again. They trace the location of the Kryptonian refugee to a prison in deep Russia, break in and instead of Superman they see an apparently starving young girl. Barry insists on saving her. She is, of course, Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), kept for examination by the Russians under kryptonite lasers and deprived of sunlight. Of course, Batman gets the team to the surface, and she immediately begins to kick ass.
Batman, Supergirl and Stoner Barry all work together to (eventually) restore Barry’s Speed Force, and the four heroes fly out to where the Kryptonian forces are fighting the US Army in the desert. And this leads to much CGI ass-kicking and stuntwork, but with only one Kryptonian against dozens, the fight is against the heroes. Batman is killed and Zod stabs Supergirl, injecting her with a probe to harvest her DNA as the basis for a program to terraform Earth to Krypton standards, which will kill all existing life.
The two Barrys go back to the time nexus to rewind things to the middle of the fight and change events, but it doesn’t work: Batman is saved (temporarily) but they can’t stop the Kryptonians from taking Supergirl. Eventually Barry realizes this is the fixed event he can’t avoid, and he needs to give up. And Stoner Barry, who has been brought all this way for nothing, refuses to accept this, and won’t let him leave.
This conflict causes the various multiverses to begin crashing in on each other, and at this point the audience sees a whole bunch of crossovers, including George Reeves, Christopher Reeve AND Helen Slater, Adam West, and the Hair Club For Supermen Nicholas Cage, FIGHTING A GIANT SPIDER.
Strange, in the middle of all this fan service, given that DC obviously doesn’t care about paying actors for using their likenesses with cheap CGI, they didn’t bring in Grant Gussin from The Flash series on CW. (After all, Miller did appear there once.) But that probably would have been an unfavorable comparison. Gussin’s Barry may have been an overbearing do-gooder much of the time, but he was a real four-color hero and not a schlemiel.
In any event, Barry overcomes the internal conflict and manages to go back to the day of his mom’s murder, taking the can of tomatoes out of her cart, then going back “home.” At which point, he’s summoned to court in his Dad’s case, because the Wayne Enterprises tape has revealed new evidence. Apparently when Barry put the can of tomatoes back he put it on a different shelf, so when his Dad came to the store, he looked up to get it, so his face was on the security cam, and that proved his alibi. So Barry at least saved one of his parents. After Barry has a brief celebration with his girlfriend, Bruce Wayne comes to give congratulations. Except, now he’s George Clooney.
Oh, sorry. I guess there were spoilers.
I have to agree with some of the critics who point out that for all the comic-relief qualities that made Miller’s performance such a ray of sunshine in the Justice League movie(s), the same approach makes them seem like a nervous klutz when they have to carry their own movie.
The other issue is that just as Barry keeps trying to rewind the past, fans have already seen this before. It was called Flashpoint, a comic book crossover in which Barry’s attempts to save his family had disastrous effects. Flashpoint was one of the major story arcs in the later DC Universe, much as The Infinity Gauntlet is for Marvel, and like it has been re-used for various other media: graphic novels, TV cartoons, and the CW series. And in most of these cases the results were better stories.
The really odd thing is that as this script was hashed and re-hashed over years, in typical Hollywood fashion, two of the listed co-writers (who were previously on track to direct The Flash) were John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who were also directors and co-writers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But the silliness worked in that movie, because it was more consistent with the tone, where the characters were basically gentleman rogues and no one really got hurt. It’s a little more jarring when you have the comedy team of Allen and Allen in scenarios where people are getting shot up with assault rifles or skewered with warblades. You would think that the Dungeons & Dragons movie would not have a code versus killing and the superhero movie would… but this IS the Snyderverse.
Or rather, it WAS the Snyderverse. The problem with building up such a massive movie is that if it doesn’t make an even more massive profit, it becomes one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history. When you combine that with the even more disappointing Black Adam (‘Finally, The ROCK – HAS COME BACK! – to the video bin’), The Flash is clearly the nail in the coffin to the “DC Extended Universe” and makes it that much more easier for producer-director James Gunn to put his stamp on everything. It’s not impossible, but increasingly unlikely, that Ezra Miller and Gal Gadot will be brought back. They’ve already recast Superman and Lois. And the people who actually liked the Snyderverse (apparently, not enough of them) are all bitching about how James Gunn is going to fuck everything up. I say, if the results are like Peacemaker, then they’re going to be even more fucked up than The Flash but more dramatically coherent.