Andy Muschietti directs Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle and Michael Keaton in this superhero epic where The Flash travels back in time to save his mom and breaks reality as we know it.

An imperfect blockbuster almost crippled by bad timing. Ezra Miller’s dual performance is actually quite a lark if you can dial into it and ignore their real life woes. That tabloid scandal has delayed the release of this, as have a bottleneck of SFX houses able to work on the project (plus a corporate takeover at WB)… all meaning The Flash comes out a day late and dollar short. When it was announced that Keaton’s Batman and Batfleck would be crossing parallel universes in a Flash solo adventure 5 years ago it felt revolutionary. Since then, multiple Spider-outings have stolen that thunder and freshness by getting out of the multiverse / legacy reunion gate first. This has to be one of the most sophisticated and ambitious productions ever in terms of digitally rendered EVERYTHING so it is understandable some shots and set pieces take you out of the reality. The desert Royal Rumble stinks for incomplete shots but the Speed Force time bending and reality colliding moments have an impressionistic ugliness I wish they leaned even further into. As for fan service, there’s so much juicy stuff here. Some genuine surprises that make the whole endeavour feel valid. I think we now know there’s a back door for Wesley Snipes’ Blade to appear in a new Blade flick and Keanu’s Constantine to appear in Justice League Dark… or Henry Cavill to play Old Man Supes in a couple of decades time. The wrapper is off finality now. The Flash movie itself has spits and spurts of both boredom and excitement. It made me smile way too often for me to write it off due to the flaws everyone else is obsessed with focussing on. We still have an Aquaman 2 due before the franchise slate is reset, I doubt that will feel as much of a celebration of all things DCEU++ as this does. Bruv even tried to sell me a Nespresso at the end!

7

Perfect Double Bill: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

My wife and I do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/