The Flash (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

It starts out surprisingly well, lots of comedy bits that work, some moderately good Flash action, and then a fun Calvin & Hobbes feel when he starts interacting with a slightly younger and much more irritating version of himself. It all zips along nicely. But then halfway through they start with the multiverse stuff and it just completely throws the film off-balance. In good multiverse movies like the Spiderverses and (imo) No Way Home, the multiverse stuff is central and integral to the plot, in messy ones like this and Dr Strange 2, they're just slung in to a different story with no real thought for the novelty of it. It gets worse and worse in Flash until finally it feels like Space Jam 2, just all these IPs on a conveyor belt trundling past the camera. And then the movie just exhaustedly falls into an ending - the obvious reveal of the purple time guy's identity, the way that apparently Barry is able to change his dad's past without messing anything up after all (is it because it's not a nexus event or whatever? Very flimsy if so.), and no resolution to the mystery of his mother's death (even if we were getting a sequel, which I assume is off the cards now, this movie spends its first half setting that mystery up - it's a terrible decision to just drop it). The Clooney cameo was good fun, though. But then the Momoa cameo was dreadful.

The CG humans are fairly terrible throughout - it feels like you're watching one of those Resident Evil CG movies a lot of the time. In the 'Speed Force Bowl', they do put a load of filters over it in a commendable attempt to make it feel like a stylised choice but this is undone by the facts that a) it still looks ugly and b) the rest of the movie is filled with plasticy faces too. It's just something you have to accept watching this movie - sometimes the people just won't look like people. Along with the tacky set-up, it really scuppers the IP cameo section.

As for Keaton Batman - he just doesn't feel right outside of a Burton movie. They tried, you can tell they did, but it just didn't work. The same goes for the whole movie, really.

Rating: some promise subsumed by messy IP manipulation.