The Flash (2023)

Now I suspect that I am going to be in the minority on this one and say that I enjoyed this film. Ok it's not perfect by any means but I think that this film turned out to be a lot better than it really should have been. The troubles of Ezra Miller almost meant that we weren’t going to see this film and perhaps most people wish we hadn’t.

The film was sold to me on Michael Keaton returning as Batman. I always have a soft spot for Keaton’s Batman films. It was a shame we didn’t get more of his Batman in films but its nice to see the Keaton renaissance continue. The only issue I had with Keaton’s involvement in the film is that he has to do a lot of action scenes and at 72 it did stretch believability that he was able to beat up people half his age. I know its a superhero film but stretching logic can only be done so much.

I think that the biggest issue with the film is how bad the special effects look. The opening part features CGI babies being put into microwaves and just trying to not fall to their deaths and they look so bad. Sadly that wasn't the last we would see bad CGI in this film as the matrix world or whatever it was looked cheap and naff. I can’t believe that someone looked at that and thought it was good enough to  be released. By the way I am not blaming the special effects or visual effects workers because they were probably given little time to make it look acceptable. 

The scene where we see multiple Superman’s and Batmans were quite good and I liked the inclusion of Nicholas Cage’s version as we never got to see that. I thought it was a nice little nod to what could have been. I know some people might not have been impressed with the visuals in this bit but i thought it was one of the few times when it looked good. The inclusion of George Clooney at the end was head scratching. He is probably the worst Batman/Bruce Wayne so to have him appear just goes to show how low the character went at one point in time. 

The Flash is better than it should have been and the fact it wasn't a dumpster fire is impressive. I don’t think that Ezra Miller deserves the credit for that and think that Andy Muschietti managed to native the potential disasters of trying to cram too much into the story rather well. It’s unlikely that we are going to get anymore Flash movies for the foreseeable future although it was always going to be tough to make a Flash movie work.