"The Flash" (2023) Review: Making a Hot Mess

 

A poster for The Flash noticably without the actual Flash

How do you begin a review of a movie with this much baggage? I don't really know, so I'm just going to try and keep my thoughts to what was on screen. Anything having to do with, say, the main star of this movie, you probably already know. So let's go. Spoilers, of course, for The Flash.

There is a moment in this film where Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is explaining to Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) about how time travel actually works, that time isn't linear. He uses spaghetti as a metaphor, showing that if you change time too much, you get a bunch of cooked spaghetti, some timelines almost parallel, some intersecting, but what you mainly get is a hot mess. How does Bruce Wayne know this? It isn't explained. This entire scene is here to explain why we are getting Michael Keaton instead of Ben Affleck, why we are getting Kara Zor-El instead of Kal-El. It's a handwave, a "Don't worry about it" to causality, a way to bypass what would be logical and instead present us with the story we have.

It's also a metaphor for the movie itself. This movie is a hot mess.

It doesn't start off that way. The beginning of the movie has a pretty great scene of Barry being called by Alfred to help Batman in Gotham and Barry has to save a bunch of babies that are falling out of a collapsing building. The term "baby shower" is used. It's fun.

Even the time travel elements are fun at first. The way that Barry travels back in time is visually gorgeous and the storyline emotional. Having two Barrys interact with each other gives the movie a fun dynamic and seeing the other Barry's life where he wasn't burdened with tragedy also adds an interesting element.

Michael Keaton is also doing his best, but it's Sasha Calle as Supergirl who is amazing. Every scene she is in is great, but then the movie wastes her. Because after her rescue, after we get a great moment between her and Barry, then we enter the Big Fight with General Zod. And the movie takes all the elements it's set up...and makes a hot mess. It becomes Man of Steel for twenty minutes and I didn't like Man of Steel back then and I don't like it with Barry, Kara, and Michael Keaton.

Perhaps it was a bad idea to bring in Michael Shannon as General Zod. Shannon has almost nothing to do except scowl. He doesn't even eat the scenery like he did back in Man of Steel. The movie seems to want to get to a place where the Barrys have to go back in time again, but...I'm pretty sure stabbing a Kryptonian shouldn't kill them, movie. And it does it multiple times. It wants to get to a moment, but it doesn't earn it.

It also tries to draw out several emotional death scenes and they tend to come off just...kind of funny.

In any case, the back half of the movie falls apart and then it inevitably does what we all knew it was going to do and resets things to how they were but some things are different. That's one of my biggest disappointments, that there is nothing that surprised me. Even the bevy of cameos was something that I expected and seemed less to be a celebration and more a cynical ploy to get everyone to make the "Leonardo diCaprio pointing" meme.

Yep, that's the one.

So. If you want a fun first half, a great performance by Sashe Calle, and a disappointing back half, well, that's The Flash. Or you could just watch Across the Spider-Verse again.