THE FLASH

CONTAINS SOME LARGE SPOILERS

This is where we've come to, is it? This is the end result of however many years of bellends in spandex repeatedly punching space monsters, mythical demons and occasionally each other into ever more spectacular orgasms of CGI destruction? Coherent storytelling and involving characterisation have been sacrificed on the multiple altars of incoherent computer effects, gibberish writing and bowing and scraping to the hardcore comicbook nerd audience who frankly should have grown out of this thudding drivel by now. (I speak as a semi-hardcore horror movie nerd, but even I have long since wearied of nudge-wink references to An American Werewolf In London and movies that name their supporting characters Romero or Carpenter.)

The big thing now is the Multiverse, allowing alternate versions of characters to turn up in each other's universes. Star Trek, Doctor Who and Red Dwarf have all given their casts opportunities to encounter wildly different versions of themselves: young/old, good/evil, male/female. Marvel have been doing it for a while: the last live-action Spiderman did this, dragging Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire's versions into Tom Holland's world, along with their respective villains for a multi-dimensional supermegasmackdown, and the last Doctor Strange whizzed through a whole series of possible other realities. Then there are the two (so far) Spider-verse animations, which I haven't bothered with. And Everything Everywhere All At Once sought to bring the possibilities of interdimensional travel into some kind of comprehensible comedic focus, with some measure of success.

Let's ignore the numerous offscreen controversies surrounding star Ezra Miller: suffice to say that a brief skim through Wikipedia reveals way more than you ever want or need to know. The problems start with Barry Allen/The Flash: most superheroes are more interesting in their human guises than in their secret identity but he's profoundly annoying in both hats and if that wasn't enough there are two of him because he's tried to go back in time to prevent his mother's murder. Instead he's ended up in a parallel timeline where General Zod (the one from the Zack Snyder Superman movies) is about to attack Earth and The Flashes have to team up with Batman (the one from the Tim Burton movies) and Supergirl and they all go off and fight in the desert to save the world or something.

Multiverse logic also means we don't really care: why should we? It's all happening in an alternate reality where some things are slightly different (Eric Stoltz was the star of Back To The Future) and some things are radically different (there's no Superman) but crucially it isn't happening in ours. So what if that world gets destroyed? Ours doesn't: Zod's already been defeated in this one. The timeline crossover is a device for disregarding continuity completely while at the same time giving you more continuity than you know what to do with. So: walk-on cameos from Helen Slater's Supergirl and Adam West's Batman (among others) through the dubious miracle of CGI as multiple realities and unrealities collide and explode around them, while The Two Barries conspire to be four times as tiresome as when there's only one of them.

DC and Warners apparently coughed up somewhere in the region of Two Hundred Million Dollars for The Flash, which makes you wonder just how terrible Batgirl was that they wrote it off at half that price and put all their weight behind this rubbish. I refuse to believe it's worse, if only because I don't see how it could be. The end result of all the computer-generated whizzbang isn't excitement or exhilaration, it's just bludgeoning exhaustion as the plot strives ever more frantically to get back to where it started in as loud a fashion as possible. The opening action sequence feels like a nightmare that piles mayhem upon chaos upon disaster, but at no point are we invited or expected to care about the "drama" that follows. It's crushingly dull and part of me, not altogether mean-spiritedly, hopes that Warners and DC lose an absolute ton of money on this and maybe, just maybe, start making halfway decent films instead.  What happened to cinema that this tedious stodge is regarded as borderline acceptable even as a summer blockbuster entertainment?

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