Photo: Warner Bros. Discovery/YouTube
Warner Bros. Discovery has hung their extended universal hopes on The Flash. Starring the controversial Ezra Miller and kicking off James Gunn and Peter Safran’s tenure as heads of the DCU, The Flash is supposed to (speed) force us into caring about Detective Comics again. But critics aren’t picking up what director Andy Muschietti is putting down. Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién called the film “the same gray slop” as all the other DCU joints. Inverse calls it “a jumbled culmination of Hollywood’s obsession with IP and nostalgia masquerading as an earnest time-skipping adventure.” Not every critic absolutely hated it. Variety and Digital Spy both gave the film some praise, lauding Miller’s performance despite the issues in their personal life. The most glowing review came from Tom Cruise, a.k.a. “Mr. Movie Industry,” whose support gave the director a real “confidence boost,” per Games Radar. Here’s what critics are saying about The Flash.
“A space once infinite is crowded with obvious brand-extension ploys that divert only temporarily from the crushing weight of our present reality and ultimately strand viewers in a story uninterested in anything resembling humanity. Despite its tangled behind-the-scenes history — directors jumping from the project as if it were the Titanic, the escalating legal issues of its star — the film is remarkably banal. It’s a deteriorating rest stop on the road to nowhere.” —Angelica Jade Bastién, Vulture
“One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, ‘The Flash’ is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It features some of the best digital FX work I’ve seen and some of the worst. Like its sincere but often hapless hero, it keeps exceeding every expectation we might have for its competence only to instantly face-plant into the nearest wall.” —Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com
“Despite all the narrative (and visual) noise of the movie, The Flash expertly communicates how lonely Barry Allen is. He craves friendship and, more than anything, yearns for the simple happiness of his childhood when his mother and father lovingly made pasta together. It’s what drives him to try to save his mother and try to maintain this new timeline, at any cost. Ironically, The Flash can’t see that its many Easter eggs and cameos are doing the exact same thing — flooding us with nostalgia for simpler times, without any consideration for how hollow those joys are.” —Hoai-Tran Bui, Inverse
“The trouble with ‘The Flash’ is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.” —Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“It perhaps won’t surprise you to learn that if you go in with those lofty expectations, you might end up disappointed. The Flash isn’t terrible, but it is what it is: an enjoyable DC offering that also suffers from very familiar issues. The Dark Knight, it isn’t.” —Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy
“For all its focus on fun and adventure, and its ability to sweep us away in a lightning storm of spectacle, The Flash ultimately runs too hard to achieve any real sense of narrative grace, and the result is a film that feels overstuffed, uneven, and a little frustrating.” —Matthew Jackson, AV Club
The Flash Movie Critic (& Tom Cruise) Review Roundup
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