Man, I am so sick of the multiverse. This year alone, Marvel has given us Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Now, the DC universe joins in with its own multiverse adventure: its first standalone film about The Flash, aka Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), who runs so fast he can alter time.
The multiverse gambit makes sense in that it provides a sandbox for writers to play in, and proves a good metaphorical way to tie together many decades of comic-book plots. But it also often leads to overly dense, unnecessarily baffling storylines.
Given The Flash’s relegated-to-the-background role in the Justice League films, director Andy Muschietti and Birds of Prey screenwriter Christina Hodson must do some work to colour in a backstory for the mercurial Allen.
Of course, that backstory is tragic in the broad, stereotypically comic-book, sense: a murdered mother (Maribel Verdú) and a father (Ron Livingston) wrongly imprisoned for the crime. This defining event will be the engine for Allen’s dilemma in the film, in some ways more so than enemy General Zod (a suitably sinister Michael Shannon), who is hellbent on Earth’s destruction.
At the film’s start, Allen malingers in the shadow of Ben Affleck’s Batman and the other Justice Leaguers, complaining to Batfleck how he is for ever cleaning up their messes. That is until his burning desire to fix his own past comes to bear on the present.
But messing with the space-time continuum has its dangers, and as Hollywood has long shown us, is always bound to cause serious complications. After speeding into the past to try to save his mother and father from their respective fates, Allen ends up split in two, stuck with a younger, hyperactive version of himself in a kind of buddy comedy double act.
This new alternative universe also sees Michael Keaton’s classic Batman – gruff and greying – join proceedings. With multiple Barry Allens and multiple Batmans facing Zod and the collapsing multiverse that Allen himself has brought about, the plot continues to unfurl confusingly as the CGI battles grow zanier.
This isn’t to say there aren’t high points: The Flash is often witty, particularly in one amusing moment when Allen moans that he’s “destroyed the universe” after he learns that Eric Stoltz, not Michael J Fox, has taken on the role of Marty McFly in Back to the Future. And Keaton is a perfect, grouchy foil to the garrulous Miller, who in turn is good in their part as Allen, both because and in spite of their irritating energy.
But the film’s convoluted parallel plot adds almost nothing to the impact of the storytelling, other than to make it feel muddled and, as superhero movies are prone to being, never complete. A breezily funny first half cannot make up for how needlessly confusing so much of the rest of the film makes itself.
