TMS Movie Review: The Flash
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Let’s go back some years ago. Exactly 12 years ago to 2011. I see Lynne Ramsay’s much acclaimed drama We Need to Talk About Kevin upon release and am mesmerized by the young actor who plays mentally deranged Kevin, Ezra Miller. I think, here’s a fresh, new actor who has potential to be the next big indie darling in cinema. Screen presence, talent, unconventionally unique looks. I got reminisces of Joseph-Gordon Levitt and even young Leonardo DiCaprio. Ezra was this for a bit with Kevin, along with Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). But, ho boy. Let me tell you, I never would have expected a decade later for Miller to not only come out as non-binary, but also be criminally wanted for assault, harassment, kidnapping, burglary, and illicit drugs. Naturally, Warner Bros. were suddenly under pressure to make a judgment call on the release of their recently completed superhero movie, The Flash, while most of these incidents were occurring with the main star throughout summer 2022. After about a year of waiting, the time-traveling odyssey was given a summer release unceremoniously.
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The character of Barry Allen [AKA, The Flash], isn’t exactly on my radar. My main familiarity with him is Leo DiCaprio’s character in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) using ‘Barry Allen’ as one of his aliases, and Ezra’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). I don’t read comic books, I never watched the CW series “The Flash” (2014-2023), and I didn’t see either Joss Whedon’s or Zack Snyder’s cuts of Justice League (2017). I’ve already gone into superhero fatigue with both Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) and Peyton Reed’s Ant-man & the Wasp: Quantumania (2023). So, I’m just going to make a few general statements. Time travel is a weak science fiction trope. Using multi-universes as an easy way to bring back previous interpretations of iconic characters loses its appeal if you use the trope too many times in short proximity. The whole transparent meta concept in superhero universes only worked with Jon Watts’ Spider-man: No Way Home (2021) because it was the first movie to officially use this trope, and it was a trip to see Tobey Maguire again in the Spidey suit. The crossovers, the celeb cameos, the comic relief, the time travel logic or visual effects. None of these gimmicks worked in Sam Raimi’s Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) or right now in The Flash, and they’re most likely not going to again anytime soon. Find a new subgenre for action/adventure pictures.