144 min | PG-13 | June 16, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Barry Allen runs back in time to save his mother and tears a hole in reality instead. The multiverse he breaks coughs up an aging Batman and a Supergirl nobody came to rescue. The premise is a mission statement. The movie is a clearance sale.
Barry Allen is the fastest man alive and the loneliest. He learns he can run fast enough to travel through time. So he goes back to stop the murder that orphaned him as a child. The change saves his mother and erases the world he knew. The Flash is a film about grief that thinks it can outrun consequence, and it spends its length discovering that every fix creates a new wound.
Ezra Miller plays two versions of Barry and finds the seam between them. The original is haunted and careful. The younger one is a manic college kid who has never lost anything, and Miller plays him as exhausting on purpose. The two-Barry scenes work because Miller commits to the contrast instead of smoothing it over. Michael Keaton returns as Bruce Wayne and slides back into the cowl with weary gravity. Sasha Calle plays Kara Zor-El as a prisoner who trusts no one, and she gives the film its only genuine note of menace. Michael Shannon brings back General Zod as a man reciting threats he has already delivered.
Andy Muschietti directs from a script by Christina Hodson, and the seams show in the visual effects. The super-speed sequences render Barry in a smeared digital world that looks unfinished and rubbery. The resurrected cameos arrive as plastic computer-generated faces that break the spell every time they appear. Muschietti stages the human scenes with more care than the spectacle. A quiet grocery-store moment between Barry and his mother carries more weight than any chronal collapse. The film keeps reaching for awe and landing on uncanny.
This is a movie at war with itself. Half of it is a sincere story about a son who cannot let his mother go. The other half is a corporate victory lap that drags in old faces to remind you what you used to love. Hodson’s emotional core is real and the multiverse machinery built around it is hollow. The Flash wants to honor an era and close it at the same time, and it cannot do both, so it does neither.