Review: 'The Flash' is a monster mash of references to other superhero movies, with only a dash of originality

Do you remember in the first “Ant-Man” movie, there was a cameo by Garrett Morris — who, as die-hard fans would know, portrayed Ant-Man in a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” in the ‘70s? Now imagine a whole movie of callbacks like that, and you have DC’s “The Flash” in a nutshell.

Ostensibly, director Andy Muschetti (“It” and “It Chapter Two”) is telling the story of Barry Allen, aka The Flash, the lightning-fast young superhero of Central City. In reality, though, Muschetti and screenwriter Christina Hodson (who wrote DC’s “Birds of Prey”) are reworking a catalog of DC’s intellectual property, throwing in elbow-to-the-ribs references to the DC-related movies of Tim Burton, the Snyder-verse and other eras — in an effort to show how clever it all is, at the expense of anything approaching a human emotion.

Barry, like most DC superheroes, is leading a double life. As The Flash, he works with his Justice League colleagues to thwart disasters, such as an early set piece where a hospital is crumbling and he catches babies as they fall out of the maternity ward. As Barry, he works in Central City’s police forensics labs, while trying to find the evidence to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who has served 20 years for the stabbing death of Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú).

Barry realizes that he has the power, thanks to his rapid running, to travel back in time — something his mentor, Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (played by Ben Affleck), warns him will have unforeseen consequences. But Barry is determined to go back and make a tiny, prosaic change that will change the circumstances that preceded Nora’s death.

The effect Muschetti uses to depict Barry’s time traveling is visually arresting — like a giant zoetrope with images of the past duplicated and spun around him. But the effort, and a monstrous figure caught in the time stream, forces Barry out of time traveling, and he lands five years too soon, where he encounters himself as an obnoxious 18-year-old. 

And while Nora is still alive, there are other problems in this timeline. For starters, General Zoe (Michael Shannon), the world-dominating Kryptonian, is back on the scene — but there’s no sign of Superman, Wonder Woman or the other “meta humans” that are Barry’s super friends. When the two Barrys go looking for Bruce Wayne, they find him, but he isn’t Barry’s Bruce. He’s a scraggly, hermit living in Wayne Manor, and played by Michael Keaton.

Barry is determined to fix the timelines he broke, and make the universe normal again. But the movie, after a while, lets Barry come to the inevitable conclusion that for the universe to survive, Nora must be allowed to die.

Muschetti is saddled with inheriting the worse aspects of Zack Snyder’s influence on the DC movie universe — the drab color palette, the grim action sequences, and the poor use of the movie’s female characters, namely Barry’s crush, young reporter Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), and the emergence of the Kryptonian woman Kara (Sasha Calle), better known as Supergirl.

The bending of the timelines is convoluted, though anyone who’s a fan of time-travel scenarios will recognize the concepts immediately. Playing with time and having multiple actors play the same character?  “Doctor Who” does that with regularity. And after the dimension-hopping possibilities explored in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the options of the multiverse shown here — even in the grand finale, which resurrects three deceased actors through CGI — feel pedestrian.

The best thing about “The Flash” is the thing Warner Bros. can’t mention too loudly in its marketing: Its star, Ezra Miller. In the double role of both Barrys, Miller (whose offscreen bad behavior has eclipsed his onscreen talent) captures the comedy and drama of the situation, and gives a strong, empathetic performance that goes right even when so much else in this overamped movie goes wrong.

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‘The Flash’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity. Running time: 144 minutes.