The Flash

 

Allen, No Alyn

The Flash
Directed by Andy Muschietti
USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand  
2023 Warner Brothers/DC
UK cinema release print

Warning: This one will have all the spoilers. Seriously don’t read if you don’t want to know.

The Flash is the long delayed DCU (DC Universe) movie which is being touted as a soft reboot of the franchise, so DC can mothball the old one and reboot the characters in a new series of movies. Which, frankly, is a bad idea, especially since one of the casualties of this bizarrely terrible decision was the cancellation of a third stand alone Wonder Woman movie, from what I can make out. Well, at least I got to see Gal Gadot reprise her role in at least two DC movies this year (so far... I’m hoping she’ll turn up in Aquaman but, you know, suspect she won’t).

The film has been long delayed, as far as I can tell, due to a combination of the Covid pandemic coupled with the somewhat psychotic, ‘how is this guy not in jail?’ behaviour of Ezra Miller. Miller reprises his role as Barry Allen (aka The Flash), a kind of heavily dumbed down and reinvented version of him than in the original comics, who first appeared in a cameo moment in Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice (if memory serves, reviewed here) before being introduced properly in the movie Justice League (um... both of them... reviewed here and here).

And basically, this is DCs big multiverse movie, following in the cinematic footsteps of Marvel’s Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse (reviewed here), Spider-Man: No Way Home (reviewed here) and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (reviewed here). Back in the 1970s or 80s, both DC and Marvel Comics had big event mini-series such as Crisis On Infinite Earths or Secret Wars to try and clean their huge and unwieldy universes of continuity errors and, honestly, it wasn’t the last time they had to do this. Now both companies seem to be taking a similar approach to clean house cinematically with their big screen counterparts but, honestly, I’ve no idea how the next two DC movies this year featuring Blue Beetle and Aquaman, destined to be the last DCU movies, will manage to fit in with this one. This one is very loosely based on the Flashpoint storyline.

As a movie itself... well a few people seem to hate The Flash and many are saying it’s the best thing DC have done in a while. My take is, it’s neither of those things. It’s action packed and has a lot of good comedy moments with a lot of spectacle and, in some ways, a morality lesson although, honestly, the endgame of the movie leaves a lot to be desired in terms of just where we are with the version of reality the first Ezra Miller Flash has landed in. Yeah, that’s right, there are two identical looking Barry Allens in this movie (plus one not so identical looking version) but, even so, it didn’t need to get confusing... except where it leaves things in both the pre-end credits scene and the post credits scene is... somehow not going to connect up with the next two films, I suspect.

Okay, so it’s got action, it’s got comedy and... it’s got a fair few actors from DC’s past crammed into it in much the same way as Marvel started using previous franchise iterations as manifestations of the multiverse. Primarily we have Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman (even though Ben Affleck starts off as Batman in this movie) and, I suspect he’s probably the main reason people are flocking to this film. He may be 72 years old now but his participation in this movie as a major character demonstrates just why he owns the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne. And once the ‘old man raggedy beard and long hair’ is gone... he doesn’t look that different to when he played the role twice in the 1980s, it has to be said.

Also, we have a new superhero in this film’s version of Supergirl, played with a lot of good screen presence by Sasha Calle... who ends up helping the two Barry Allens and Batman take on General Zod in his attempt to destroy the Earth (with Michael Shannon once again reprising the role of Zod, from his appearance in Man Of Steel, reviewed here). In addition we have, as I said, a lot of actors from DC’s past... both in the form of proper cameos and also CGI integrated moments. Most of these are uncredited too, on the final cast list and, I wish Warner Brother had put their names up there. And we really do get into spoiler warning territory here so, yeah, you were warned...

So, in terms of proper cameos with real actors doing new things, we have Gal Gadot back as Wonder Woman, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, Ben Affleck as a version of Batman, Jeremy Irons as Alfred and George Clooney as another version of Batman (or more strictly, just Bruce Wayne).

And then there are the computer integrated cameos. So we have a welcome return to George Reeves as Superman, Christopher Reeve as Superman, Adam West as Batman, Helen Slater as Supergirl, a version of the original Jay Garrick Golden Age Flash played by Teddy Sears and, yeah, even a terrible looking CGI version of Nicolas Cage turning up as the Superman he almost made with Tim Burton (although wearing the more traditional Superman suit, rather than the black version designed for him for Superman Lives). What I got annoyed about though, is the actors that don’t make it into the movie. How can you have George Reeves in this, who was the second screen incarnation of the last son of Krypton... and not have the original actor, Kirk Alyn, put in a cameo appearance? That’s crazy.

Yes, the film is piled high with cameos and, of course, multiverse jokes (Eric Stoltz didn’t get fired from Back To The Future in the version of the universe in which Barry Allen version one ends up, for instance). And it’s... relatively entertaining. It’s not the greatest thing ever but it’s not too terrible either and it’s great seeing Michael Keaton’s Batman trying to pull electricity into his Batcave in exactly the same way Dr. Frankenstein did in the 1931 Frankenstein movie (reviewed here). Yeah, this almost goes the full Strickfadden in regards to that... I suspect that’s the way Tim Burton might have gone with it if he was directing this thing. All held together by a quite good score from Benjamin Wallfisch (who also incorporates Danny Elfman’s Batman theme into the mix), which I really hope will get a proper CD release at some point soon and not just wallow in a useless digital version.

And that’s it apart from one more slight criticism concerning Ezra Miller... or more accurately, Ezra Miller’s character. I’m not going to pass any judgement on what he’s allegedly done in real life but he seems like a good actor to me. However... and this may be the reason why I found this movie to be only quite good as opposed to great... his character, specifically the alternate universe version of Barry Allen, is extremely grating and unlikeable. I mean, I get it. He’s supposed to be irritating but... guess what writers? Bullseye. Why did you think I wanted to be that irritated by this annoying character throughout? I was just hoping he’d get killed at some point because he’s so unlikeable. Oh... and for the record... I don’t believe The Flash has super-healing powers, right? If you get shot in the knee and are acting like you’re in agony and can’t walk properly for a while... it doesn’t kind of fix itself so you can carry on being a superhero after a few hours. A little verisimilitude wouldn’t have hurt here or... you know... have it so he doesn’t get shot in the knee in the first place, if he has to carry on doing all the superhero stuff.

Oh... and alright... maybe one more criticism, now I think of it. In an alternate version of Earth where Kal El never made it there, how the hell did anyone manage to capture his cousin and keep her trapped away from the sun for so many years? Surely you would have to have had some Kryptonite to do that (and recognise what that is) and, yeah, she’s obviously been in a Russian jail for many years before Zod arrives so, hmm... that’s a puzzler (or just bad writing) for sure.

Anyway... The Flash is a nice enough movie, not a disaster but certainly also not one of the best of the DC universe films, for sure. You might want to give it a go because, heck, it’s nice to be able to see George Reeves, however fleetingly, at a cinema again.

Justice League

Beleaguered Leaguers

Justice League
2017 USA Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there will be some spoilers in this one, I think.

Okay, so let me just say up front that Justice League is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination... it’s just not a very good one either. It has its great little moments and a whole bunch of problems but, out of the five films to date making up the story arc of this particular set of interlocking DC superhero movies, this is about halfway up the list in terms of being an effective and entertaining movie.

DC’s track record hasn’t been all that great since the fantastic last part of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night trilogy, it has to be said. Man Of Steel (reviewed here) was just dreadful. Batman Vs Superman - Dawn of Justice (reviewed here) was a fair bit better but ultimately not very well received by critics and audiences alike, it seemed to me. Suicide Squad (reviewed here) was... okayish but really wasn’t making people that happy either. But then we had ‘the movie’. Wonder Woman (reviewed here) isn’t just the greatest superhero movie of all time (and, yeah, I know that’s a brave and bold claim to make but I promise this is not a knee jerk reaction to it)... it’s also one of the best movies in the past few years, period. It’s also flattened all the competition at the box office for the forseeable future (or just maybe until the new Star Wars movie premieres next month) and it more than deserves its success.

The thing is, though, everyone was kinda hoping that Justice League would somehow live up to the almost impossible standard that Patty Jenkins set with Wonder Woman and, frankly, that would be hard to top even by her, when she comes to work on the sequel. So I guess it’s no surprise that this movie comes nowhere near as close to the dizzying heights that Professor William Moulton Marston’s amazonian princess scaled to in her own solo movie adaptation. A shame, though, that Justice League doesn’t come close to the Batman VS Superman movie either.

Now I’m not going to go into the production problems this film had, what with Zack Snyder leaving for very understandable reasons and Joss Whedon reshooting the thing in places... firstly because I would be no good at figuring out which bits were directed by whom and, secondly, because it’s the film we’ve ended up with, for better or worse. Given Snyder’s reasons for leaving, there’s absolutely no point in having an autopsy on why this theatrically released cut doesn't really cut it.

Okay... so lets look at the good stuff first and get that out of the way...

Well, some of the action was okay, especially the Amazon’s fighting the villain of the piece, Steppenwolf, near the start... and also in the bank scene where Gal Gadot’s Diana saves a bunch of people by doing some cool action stuff. That being said, I did miss the sudden glow of orange as the metal on her wrist bands cool down after a bullet hit, which was a nice detail in Patty Jenkins movie during the alley scene in London... itself an homage, presumably, to the alley scene in Superman The Movie. Gadot is just wonderful again here, as she was in her previous two movies with this character because a) she looks just like she could do all this stuff in real life and b) because she performed it in such a way that she doesn’t betray the character as set up in the previous two films.

Similarly, say what you will about Ben Affleck but I think he makes a brilliant Bruce Wayne/Batman and I really hope he doesn’t leave the role after this. I think he could really do well in a solo Batman movie and I would really like to see it.

Henry Cavill... well I hated Superman in Man Of Steel but that’s more because of the script than Cavill’s performance and I certainly warmed to him more in Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice. He’s great here too and you really believe in his character, who he portrays with the same kind of honourable presence as some of the great actors who have played the part before him... and I’m specifically thinking of Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve here. Now if they’d only bring back the ‘S’ kiss curl and the red trunks then the illusion would be complete.

Jeremy Irons as Alfred has about as much screen time as he did in the previous movie but I think his character makes a bigger impact here, with various ironic comments thrown at Bruce Wayne which I found fairly entertaining.

 It was also great seeing a Green Lantern in the sequence flashing back to a battle on Earth which took places many hundreds of years ago, too. It’s been suggested that the cloak on him was a reference to the original Golden Age iteration of the character in comics but, the people saying that might do well to remember that the original Green Lantern’s costume was red (yeah, I know that’s ridiculous but don’t blame me... I didn’t write those things).

And that’s mostly the good stuff.

Now we also have three new members on the team...

Ezra Miller does okay as a really bizarre and teenage angsty version of the silver age version of The Flash (aka Barry Allen) and he was getting a good reaction from the audience at my screening. Personally I didn’t find him all that easy to identify with and I could take him or leave him, to be fair. Then we have Cyborg, who was a member of the Teen Titans the last time I read of him (sometime in the early 1980s) so goodness knows what he’s doing in the Justice League of America (as the supergroup was always known in the comics... until maybe recently). He’s played here by a guy called Ray Fisher and, although he turns in a solid performance, I couldn’t help but think that the script wasn’t doing him any favours. He just comes across as a bit dull, to be honest.

Jason Momoa’s version of Aquaman is a more fun character but, honestly, is nothing like the Aquaman I used to enjoy reading about when I was a kid (I even had a little action figure). The clean shaven, blonde version of Superman with the blue eyes, orange suit and green legs and gauntlets has morphed into what is presumably a more contemporary comic book version of the character (well... at least he still has both of his arms here). Again... he was okay but I really would have preferred the version of the character I grew up with here.

Okay... let’s get to the really bad then...

So much of the dialogue between Batman and Diana feels forced and, bearing in mind the amount of times that Steve Trevor’s name is bandied about, it somehow seems disrespectful of the truly marvellous solo Wonder Woman movie what came out earlier in the year.

Another thing which felt out of place was that the background story about the ‘mother boxes’ seemed like it came completely out of the blue and Diana never once goes to Thermyscira to consult with the Amazons. Indeed, she even goes so far as to say that they cannot leave their island... which is a completely redundant and contradictory idea in terms of their purpose on Earth, to be honest. This film so badly needed a scene between Diana and her mother and it similarly needed ‘the amazon horde’ to come galloping in for the somewhat bland (as it is here) action finale too. Especially since their own battle with Steppenwolf near the beginning of the movie was a heck of a lot better.

The way Superman is brought back to life is really stupid Doctor Frankenstein stuff and I couldn’t help but think it all seemed just a little too optimistic and contrived. “Gee whiz... wouldn’t it be great if we could use this mother box technology to bring Superman back to life with?”... well, okay, it wasn’t quite like that but it was pretty close. It felt like the whole thing was written by a small child at this point. What was worse than that though was... Superman and Batman were allies by the end of Batman Vs Superman. In fact, Batman saved Superman’s mother’s life. So why the heck would the newly woken Superman be so aggressively hostile to Batman and the others and try to kill them all? It made no sense. It was like watching that truly dumb scene in Superman III where he splits into two and the evil and good halves fight. It just made no sense.

And then they trot out Amy Adam’s Lois Lane to calm him down? Honestly, it felt like her role was really pushed to the back in this and the scene where she and Diane Lane as Martha Kent were talking in the newspaper offices felt like it was shot quickly in the director’s favourite room in his house one afternoon. The set dressing and feel of the scene seemed to be completely unconvincing.

The music is perplexing too. Danny Elfman has been tapped for this one but I felt like either Hans Zimmer or, especially, Rupert Gregson-Williams (who had provided real emotional depth to the Wonder Woman movie) should have got the gig here. Instead, Elfman uses various themes from films gone by to weave a new musical direction for the franchise and... it just felt wrong. Okay, so he uses Zimmer’s Superman theme from Man Of Steel at one point and he similarly uses Zimmer’s “Is She With You?” theme for Wonder Woman in a less striking arrangement (but without using Gregson-Williams gorgeous thematic material). However, he also uses John WIlliams' Superman music at one point too plus... he even uses his own 1980s Batman theme for some of Ben Affleck’s Batcentric shenanigans. None of that really made sense... what’s he trying to evoke here. It’s a nice enough score, when you can hear it over the noisy sound effects but... it doesn’t knock it out of the park like some of the films in this series do.

Okay, last thing I’ll highlight here is the running time. This is the shortest of the recent DC movies, clocking in at one minute shy of two hours. But you are dealing with six superhero characters, not to mention the big bad guy and the introduction of the mother box on the narrative. How do you cram all that into two hours without losing sight of something? Short answer... you don’t. This film feels like it should be a lot longer and, I dunno, less flippant and somewhat darker in tone considering the events that have birthed it in the previous films. Things felt somewhat rushed... especially when it hurtles to a climax that is less than interesting.

Also... you have continuity errors like the mother box being used to bring Cyborg to life being in the previous film, which makes no sense. Or the fact that the third mother box was found during World War I when, if you check out the epilogue scene included on the home video version of Wonder Woman, you’ll know that Etta Candy and the others were tasked with the mission to find it after the end of the war depicted in that film. Thins like this just seemed a bit like sloppy writing to me, it has to be said.

So, yeah, that’s my review of Justice League. All in all I’m glad I went to see it... if for nothing more than to see Gal Gadot totally slaying it as Wonder Woman. However, the film didn’t blow me away, for sure and it certainly felt a little more anti-climactic than I was expecting. All in all, if you loved Wonder Woman then you’ll probably want to see this one anyway. I can’t really recommend it to anyone on any other basis though so... make of that what you will. Old school DC comics fans, though, would do well to look out for the first of the two post-credits scenes if they want to see a familiar homage and... don’t miss the end if you want to see what happened to another character from a previous movie in the series.