‘The Flash’ Was Never Going to Run Away From Its Problems

Considering the sheer number of films that reach audiences in a given year—449 were released domestically in 2022 alone—the actual act of moviemaking has perhaps been taken for granted. No less an authority than Tom Hanks has said that while he believes he’s made only a handful of good movies in his career (agree to disagree), he’s continually amazed by how any of them come together. “From a flicker of an idea to the flickering image on-screen, the whole process is a miracle,” the actor told People in 2022. Unsurprisingly, not all films are finished without a hitch: The history of cinema is littered with ill-fated productions, whether it’s from entire sets being destroyed by mother nature (Apocalypse Now, Waterworld) or awful incidents befalling members of the crew. (A special effects assistant on The Omen was decapitated in a car accident, a tragedy that eerily mirrored an iconic death in the movie and happened near a road sign for a Dutch town called Ommen that was 66.6 kilometers away. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go soak myself in holy water.)

In most of these cases, the cursed vibes are specific to one facet of a production, which makes everything that’s enveloped The Flash so bizarre and somewhat unprecedented. While a film centered on the Flash has been in various stages of development at Warner Bros. since the 1980s, the current incarnation of the superhero was announced in 2014 with Ezra Miller in the title role. At the time, the movie was expected to debut in 2018, and, well, seeing as it’s now 2023, it should come as little surprise that The Flash was hit with setback after setback. Let’s break it down, because I’m not sure the average moviegoer realizes the extent of how disastrous this endeavor turned out to be.

For one, the production cycled through several filmmakers. Seth Grahame-Smith was originally attached to the project before exiting over creative differences; Rick Famuyiwa was next up until he left because of, you guessed it, creative differences; the Game Night duo of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein then took the reins and, you’re not going to believe this, creative differences led to their departure. The good news: Warner Bros. finally found someone who would stick around in Andy Muschietti, who directed both films in a two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It. The bad news: Deadline reported last year that an unnamed comic book adaptation set to come out in 2023 had supposedly gone through 45 (!) different writers in the development process. Given its notoriously troubled history, all signs point to that movie being The Flash. (If it’s any consolation, The Flash has only one credited screenwriter in Christina Hodson, who was responsible for Bumblebee and Birds of Prey, which are both delightful blockbusters.)

Ironically, the one stabilizing force throughout The Flash’s directorial game of musical chairs has been Miller: a figure who’s been the subject of many disturbing reports and legal issues with which no film would want to be associated. In 2020, a video surfaced of Miller appearing to choke a woman before throwing her to the ground. In 2022, they were arrested three times, for disorderly conduct and harassment, assault, and felony burglary. (Miller identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.) Additionally, a woman and her 12-year-old child were granted a temporary restraining order against Miller amid reports that the actor had threatened them. And multiple people have also given accounts of Miller grooming minors. The alarming behavior reportedly extended to The Flash’s production, during which they had “frequent meltdowns.” (Muschietti, for his part, says working with Miller was one of the best director-actor experiences in his career.) All the while, Warner Bros. reportedly only considered canceling The Flash as a last resort because of how much was already invested in the movie, and the studio remains noncommittal about bringing Miller back for future entries.

Thankfully for Warner, there’s an easy out for removing Miller if it wants to: the studio is in the midst of a hard reset of the DC Universe, which will now be overseen by James Gunn and Peter Safran. Essentially, Miller’s Flash and the other heroes introduced since the Zack Snyder era are completely disposable. (The hierarchy of power within DC has changed, just not in the way Dwayne Johnson would’ve wanted.) As a result, this year’s DC movie slate is the cinematic equivalent of a soccer team playing the remainder of a season after being mathematically relegated: What follows is of no consequence, and probably won’t excite the fan base. After spending all that time in development hell, The Flash finally arrives at a moment of irrelevancy.

The fact that The Flash has little bearing on DC’s future helps explain why Warner Bros. has been hyping it up to an almost comical degree—how else are they going to get butts into seats?—with Gunn going so far as to declare it “one of the greatest superhero movies ever made.” (No shade to Gunn, but that would be like the CEO of a fast food chain saying the new item on its menu is the best sandwich ever made.) The feeling of desperation has also led the powers that be to willingly spoil (uh, spoiler alert?) notable elements of the movie—Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman; Nicolas Cage making a Superman cameo—in what appears to be a shameless bid to boost ticket sales. (Imagine if the trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home gave away that Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire would appear in the movie.) In any case, while it’s impossible to divorce The Flash from all the noise surrounding it, the film still deserves to be evaluated on its own terms. Which leads us to the fateful question: Is The Flash any good?

Incredibly, even that’s difficult to unpack. To add more weight to the notion that The Flash is truly cursed, it’s coming to theaters on the heels of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which just so happens to be an all-time great comic book movie. Two superhero films sharing real estate at the multiplex is one thing—the problem is that the projects have a ton in common, and the comparison doesn’t do The Flash any favors. (Devotion is a perfectly serviceable action movie about Navy pilots during the Korean War; it would’ve been downright disastrous if it were released within weeks of Top Gun: Maverick.)

The Flash begins with Barry Allen (Miller) showing why he’s a vital cog to the Justice League, using his superhuman speed to rescue a ward of infants falling out of a crumbling hospital. (The sequence, a literal baby shower, is hilariously over the top: In slow motion, we see Barry rescue babies from loose scalpels and a container of acid—at one point, he tosses a baby in a microwave for protection.) But for all his heroics, Barry is still obsessed with clearing his father’s name over the murder of Barry’s mother when he was a child. Unfortunately, even all the high-tech gadgetry from Bruce Wayne (the Ben Affleck version) can’t uncover new evidence to exonerate an innocent man. In a fit of despair, Barry runs so fast that he inadvertently turns back time to his baby-saving exploits. Despite a warning from Bruce about how messing with the past can irreparably damage the future, Barry decides to go back to the day of his mother’s death and stop it from ever happening.

As with any time-travel movie, unforeseen complications ensue. Barry encounters a younger version of himself (Miller, with a different haircut to differentiate the characters) who has yet to attain his Flash powers. Future Barry learns that the Justice League of his universe is nowhere to be found. (The one exception being Keaton’s version of Bruce Wayne, whose crime-fighting days are long behind him.) The situation becomes even more precarious when Earth is invaded by General Zod (Michael Shannon, reprising his role from Man of Steel), who can take over the planet without Superman in the picture. This leaves two versions of the Flash—one of whom lacks the maturity and conviction of a hero that comes from experience—and a (respectfully) washed Batman to find a way to save the day, starting with tracking down Superman’s whereabouts. (As the trailers already revealed, the characters will instead find Sasha Calle’s Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Supergirl.)

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Addressing parallel universes and multiple iterations of multiple superheroes, The Flash treads much of the same ground as Across the Spider-Verse, including a familiar expository scene about the supposed importance of canonical events for its characters. (For instance, Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider and losing his uncle; Bruce becoming an orphan.) It’s not just that Across the Spider-Verse covered similar material first: aesthetically and thematically, the animated film is infinitely more compelling. The Flash certainly has its moments—anyone who grew up with Keaton’s Batman will be thrilled to see him in action again—but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the multiversal narrative is done in service of an extended corporate branding exercise. You get the sense that heroes (and A-list cameos) are peppered into The Flash not because of their value to the story, but to satisfy a subset of the audience that wants callbacks and Easter eggs handed to them on a platter. (By far the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a movie this year is Keaton bringing back his iconic “Let’s get nuts” line with all the enthusiasm of a man being held in a hostage negotiation.)

Really, the final nail in The Flash’s coffin is that what actually works best comes with plenty of asterisks. Contrary to their reported behavior off-screen, Miller’s dual role in the film is genuinely charming and nuanced. The Barry who goes back in time has to confront not only the mess he’s created, but also the resentment he harbors over a version of himself unburdened by trauma. (After being oblivious to the other heroes in the DC Extended Universe finding Barry really annoying, he also gets a taste of his own medicine from his younger self.) It’s a winning superhero performance of an actor playing opposite themselves—removed from the context of Miller’s real-life controversies, it’s a high mark for a cinematic universe that’s headed for the scrap heap.

But that’s the thing: The Flash will forever be tainted by its association with Miller, just as the movie’s release is inevitably overshadowed by Warner Bros. gearing up to start its DC universe anew. When we think of the superhero blockbusters that ended up being disasters, it usually comes down to a movie getting mired in countless delays (The New Mutants), undermined by competing visions (Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four), or just being flat-out bad (Morbius). But The Flash is a truly unique failure: a project brought down by a combination of directorial upheaval, a new creative direction from its studio, a lead actor with a laundry list of legal troubles, and a release coinciding with a pantheon-level comic book movie reckoning with many of the same ideas. Barry Allen might be the fastest man in the world, but the tragedy of The Flash is that it was never going to run away from its problems.