I Regret To Inform You That I Enjoyed 'The Flash'

The #Content Report enters the Speed Force, deciding once again that horror guys should direct all the superhero movies and comedy guys should direct all the horror movies.

Warner Bros

Every few months or so I revisit my favorite bits of Ezra Miller’s… six? 12? 18?-month-long international crime spree and find a new favorite tidbit every time, like a shifting favorite song on a much-loved album. On my most recent re-read, the one that stuck out was this bit from Vulture’s overly detailed Ezra Miller life timeline:

According to the neighbor, the evening went sideways after the mother called her friends “her tribe,” causing Miller — whom they believed to be “under the influence” — to accuse her of cultural appropriation. Following this snafu, Miller claimed that the board game Parcheesi was of Rastafarian roots, which the half-Black neighbor questioned. Ezra snapped after this interaction, the neighbor alleges. “Then they opened up their jacket — they had this, like, big Sherpa jacket — and they opened up one side of their jacket, you could see a gun, and they said, ‘Talking like that could get you into a really serious situation,’” the neighbor tells the Daily Beast.

It was obvious from the start that Ezra Miller was in the midst of some kind of mental health episode during all of this, which probably could’ve been treated if anyone could’ve gotten them into treatment. Some would claim that Miller’s behavior being clinical disqualifies it from being humorous, but I don’t know that it actually helps anyone with mental illness to pretend that psychosis can’t be funny. If hearing someone claim Parcheesi is Rastafarian doesn’t at least make you smile, that’s going to have to be an agree-to-disagree situation.

The backdrop for all of this, the havoc Miller was wreaking in Hawaii, Iceland, Germany, and Vermont, was of course Miller’s upcoming star turn in The Flash. Warner Bros had shitcanned Batgirl in Summer 2022, a fully-completed movie, simply for (according to Warner) not being very good. This raised the obvious question: how good must The Flash be for Warner Bros to stand by the movie and by Miller through the almost daily bad headlines?

Of course, what studio executives perceive as “good” and what filmgoers do can be drastically different. While the latter tend to appreciate “good movie,” the former these days tend to prize aspects like “will set up a large franchise boosting existing IP and generating numerous ancillary revenue streams.”

Miller had been fascinating as an indie actor, but his only blockbuster work I’d seen was in the Justice League movies, in which he was arguably the worst part of both cuts, a “soy dialogue” delivery system, not that you can really blame Miller for an objectively disastrous production that combined the worst excesses of Zach Snyder with the worst excesses of Joss Whedon.

All of which brings us to The Flash. Essentially I didn’t know what to expect, which is probably the ideal frame of mind for any movie. I was all set to laugh at a corporate debacle and misplaced executive hubris once again, but it turns out, Ezra Miller is great in it, a mix of novice superhero, grieving son, and hypermanic college freshman (the latter on account of Miller getting to play a younger, alternate universe version of his character). Yet the dominant impression isn’t that The Flash was Miller’s movie (which isn’t a knock on Miller so much as an acknowledgement the general level of acting across media is very high these days), it’s that it was director Andy Muschietti’s. The Flash is groundbreaking only in the narrowest of ways, but it feels like someone actually had fun making it, and that can make all the difference.

While the plot borrows heavily from Spider-Man: No Way Home and Into The Spider-Verse, and hell, even Ant-Man 3, The Flash makes it work because it’s shot with visual clarity and a sense of purpose. Muschietti directed his first feature (Mama) back in 2013, after Guillermo Del Toro saw Muschietti’s short and came on to executive produce the feature version. In 2017, Muschietti directed It, which became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, and later its sequel. I mention all this to explain that Muschietti has a background in horror, and it’s been my belief for some time now that horror guys should direct all the superhero movies (and comedy directors should direct all the horror movies). Something about the way the horror genre frequently requires directors to communicate through silent action alone, and take pleasure in the process rather than just the outcomes, seems to be the perfect training for a genre whose action scenes can so often be joyless placeholders. (But hey, that’s just a theory).

For all the readers who haven’t seen all those movies from the previous paragraph (and God bless you) the rub is that The Flash is a multi-verse plot with time travel and different iterations of characters (mostly Batman and Superman) showing up to try to fix a timeline. The paradox of massive budget blockbusters as they now stand is that with virtually infinite resources, the demands of commerce (expanded universe! characters that become stocks in an investment portfolio!) seem to have forced every tentpole into a plot about the multi-verse, in which the characters can inhabit infinite universes, which ironically seems to produce nearly identical movies.

The Flash is no different. It introduces us to Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen, who’s something like the junior partner in the Justice League. When things go badly, Batman (Ben Affleck) and Alfred (Jeremy Irons) — the de facto admin arm of the Justice League — usually call Superman or Wonder Woman first, and Barry only as a last resort. So Barry Allen has a bit of impostor syndrome about all this, which is another one of those plot points that seems to show up in every other movie nowadays, and never in a way that’s interesting or deepens our understanding of the character. Oh, someone has “trauma?” You don’t say. Ditto the fact that the superheroes are all celebrities in this movie universe, inspiring fanboy-ish reactions from bystanders and “lesser” heroes like Barry alike — a Marvel innovation that always feels like self-advertisement, as if we the audience are going to be more impressed with the heroes of the story if the other characters onscreen treat them like royalty. It always feels more like a weird attempt at behavior modeling than a story element.

Anyway, as if Barry’s imposter syndrome wasn’t bad enough, his father (Ron Livingston) is also in prison for the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdú — a Spanish speaker we see cooking pasta, possibly a personal touch from the Argentinian Muschietti). Barry now works as a lab tech, a job he was inspired to take in the hopes of one day helping prove that his father is innocent. This is all the backdrop for Barry one day discovering that he can run so fast that he can basically travel back in time. But how far back? Far enough to undo his mother’s death?

This plot point, along with a later one about The Flash being able to move through walls, is treated with just the right amount of explanation — enough to satisfy our curiosity at about 50 mph. Not enough to hold up if we actually stopped to analyze it, but just enough to let us enjoy the wind in our hair as we blow by.

After he goes back in time to save his mother using the fewest alterations to that reality as possible, Barry gets knocked out of the wormhole on the way back to his own time, landing a few years prior in an alternate universe where there’s another Barry Allen, an obnoxious college freshmen with no superpowers whose mother is still alive. When Zod (Michael Shannon) comes to Earth to terraform and conquer it (something that happened years before in Barry’s original timeline, and in Snyder’s Man Of Steel), the two Barrys have to round up the Justice League and stop him. Only… surprise, Batman is an old-ass (but surprisingly spry) Michael Keaton in this alternate timeline. Lots of other things are different too.

Spider-Man: No Way Home and Into The Spider Verse did worse and better versions of this (respectively) and Ant-Man 3 involved going quantum to save a mom. But mostly what elevates The Flash above so many of its strikingly similar (and suprisingly numerous) peers is that the action scenes in The Flash actually feel exciting. Muschietti stages them like he’s actually having fun and not merely finishing a homework assignment. That’s exceedingly rare these days, and even James Gunn, one of the all-time great directors of comic sci-fi action when he seems like he cares, was only batting about .250 in Guardians 3, which staged some shockingly utilitarian action scenes alongside its inspired ones even before it went on 20 minutes too long.

Partly this is conceptual, and a credit to writers Christina Hodson and Joby Harold, that their screenplay didn’t call for massive scale battles to move the plot along (always the dullest bits of any modern superhero movie). Certainly there are fewer battles and at smaller scale in The Flash, but even more so it feels like the action scenes were shot with wit and a sense of purpose. It’s endemic to the modern blockbusters that action sequences be placeholders in the script.

RRR should’ve been a shot across the bow to every action movie director working because, for as ridiculous as it is, the movie felt like the first time a blockbuster director was actually having fun in years. I feel like an alien sometimes because I don’t relate at all to so many movies comic book moviegoers seem to regard as “fun action.” Winter Soldier? A montage of grunty grey thumping shot in elevators and stairwells. Zzzz. So many of them are like this, set to the filmmaking equivalent of autopilot.

The action in The Flash moves, is coherent and clear, with none of the 30-odd-closeup-of-grunts that normally passes for decisive action. Muschietti correctly realizes that this is a movie about super-powered demigods, it doesn’t need realistic jiu-jitsu. Perhaps just as important, on a conceptual level, the big battles somehow seem to matter less in The Flash, which maybe frees them up to be the icing they function better as anyway.

The Flash also isn’t, as so many of these movies are, about Barry Allen having to learn to accept a personal sacrifice in order to save the universe. The Flash has only a very slight variation on that, but it’s more about Barry learning that, as Ben Affleck’s Batman says early in the film, “our scars make us who we are.”

Which is to say, it’s a journey of personal fulfillment rather than the origin story for a great civil servant (or worse, a way to complete the narrative circle for another movie). Corny though it may be, The Flash’s conflict is at least personal, appealing to emotion, rather than merely to continuity.

Which isn’t to say that The Flash goes for a less reference-heavy approach than most of its peers. In fact it might reference more. The difference is that while Marvel’s “easter eggs” (I long for the days before the necessity of this phrase) are usually specific to Marvel movies and increasingly arcane, The Flash goes broader. It calls back the Justice League canon, sure — Tim Burton’s Batman movies, obviously — but also broader “movie-lore.” The extended argument Barry has with alternate timeline Barry about who plays Marty in Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox or Eric Stoltz, is a familiar reference to any moviehead, who would know that Stoltz was replaced with Fox at the very last minute.

The movie is full of similar allusions, including to Nicolas Cage’s aborted superman movie and the giant spider Cage was meant to fight in the third act, as immortalized by a Kevin Smith story. I watched the film with my 10-year-old stepson and these references, naturally, all went right over his head. Which perhaps helps explains The Flash’s weak B Cinemascore. References to other movies aren’t usually something I prize in movies, but in a superhero ecosystem where most are desperate to set up the next property, introduce the newest hero, promo the tie-in cable series, etc., one that simply asks “Hey, remember movies?” feels innocent and even a little sweet by comparison.

Before it opened, all the big mucky mucks at DC were discussing The Flash as the new blueprint for the rest of the franchise. Now that it’s had a disappointing opening that couldn’t even outgross Black Adam, it remains to be seen whether the suits will actually stick to that. But who really wants to play fantasy studio exec anyway? The Flash smashes through almost every signpost that makes most 2020s superhero movies so terrible and succeeds anyway. I don’t know how you even create a corporate blueprint for “action scenes that actually look good,” but it turns out that’s maybe the most important thing.