‘The Flash’ Review: Electric Company

The Flash, the newest DC Comics superhero to get his very personal large present, isn’t the outfit’s standard brooding heavyweight. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (a.ok.a. a billionaire), however an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks accidentally, not by birthright or by design. Out of uniform, he’s a normie, a goof and form of endearing. He’s actually, actually quick on his ft, you guess. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when issues go greater and grimmer right here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this sort, he retains a playful weightlessness.

That’s a aid, notably given how the film tries to clobber you into submission. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a exercise, smacking you round with their shocks and awesomeness, although it generally feels as if modern superhero motion pictures have taken this type of pummeling to new extremes. That could also be true, although motion pictures have lengthy employed spectacle — pyrotechnics, lavish set items — to bait, hook and bludgeon the viewers so it retains begging for extra. If the bludgeoning feels extra inescapable as of late, it’s partly as a result of the key studios now financial institution so closely on superhero motion pictures.

“The Flash” is likely one of the extra watchable ones. It’s well solid, formidable and comparatively brisk at two and a half hours. The story tracks Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and his superhero persona, the Flash, as he whooshes, wrapped in tendrils of lightning; traverses space-time continuums; and tries to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who’s in jail for killing Barry’s mother (Maribel Verdú). As is normally the case with superhero motion pictures, the story is nonsensical and convoluted — it’s no marvel a personality makes use of a tangle of cooked spaghetti to attempt to clarify a significant plot level — however not calamitously so. The general vibe is upbeat.

Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and virtually feverishly charismatic presence. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles dangle like a cloud over this film.) Some of the Flash’s attraction, in fact, can be baked into the unique comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (by way of creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Five years later in Issue No. 123, these variations of the Flash (there are others) uncover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an thought this film, effectively, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms.