'The Flash' PEOPLE Review: Ezra Miller Is the Lightest and Brightest of Superheroes
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A terrific new addition to the D.C. Justice League
As the Flash, the nonbinary actor Ezra Miller suggests a more faun-like Jeff Goldblum — lithe and angular, talking fast and falteringly to cover insecurities, neurotic, a bit twerpy. In their tight-fitting red suit, they could be an Olympic skater perpetually worried that they’ve got gum on their blades. This is Miller’s fourth time in the role — technically, fourth and fifth, because they end up playing not one but two Flashes — and their first time shouldering the weight of an entire D.C. Justice League vehicle.
They carry the whole thing easily, practically in the palm of their hand, as if it were the remote control to the Batcave's garage door.
These films are often as sodden as sponge cake left in a rising tide, but The Flash seems to have shape-shifted to accommodate the eccentric comic gifts of its star, whose career has often been overshadowed by what they have called “complex mental health issues.”
A time-traveling, time-tripping fantasy, The Flash is funny, inventive and giddy — like the Back to the Future franchise for superheroes. In fact, there’s a running gag here that imagines an alternate reality where those films ended up starring Eric Stolz instead of Michael J. Fox. (In our own reality, of course, Stolz was replaced by Fox shortly after shooting began.) It's complicated, but time traveling usually is.
Directed by Andy Muschietti (2017’s It and 2013’s underrated Mama), the film opens with a spectacular segment in which time appears slowed to a molasses drip, as the Flash rescues infants (and an emotional-support dog) who have been flung from a high-rise hospital maternity ward into the air. They drift through the air like down.
Then we get to the nub of the plot. Out of uniform, the Flash is a forensic scientist, Barry Allen, whose father (Ron Livingston) is on trial for murdering Barry's mother (Maribel Verdú). Barry wants to prove his father’s innocence, and he wants to be released from his endless grieving for his now-absent mother. The solution: Run fast enough to disrupt and reverse time. This results in a phenomenon that looks sometimes like a giant molten bubble, sometimes like a stadium crowded with two-dimensional figures from the past, like the cover of Sgt. Pepper replicated to infinity.
All he needs to do is make one tiny adjustment on the day of his mother’s killing. It amounts to nothing more than adding a can of tomatoes to a grocery cart at the supermarket.
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This proves to be a boner of an idea. The Flash gets stuck in the past with a younger, more eagerly juvenile version of himself (Miller handles this doubling cleverly, without overdoing it), while the mutation of events creates stranger and stranger complications, including a rather lumpily begrudging version of the Justice League. This introduces us to an older, weirder Bruce Wayne, one with matted gray hair and beard — it could be Howard Hughes or Bruce Dern, but it’s none other than Michael Keaton, who starred in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).
Meanwhile, the Kryptonian villain General Zod (Michael Shannon), has returned to Earth, disembarking from his spaceship with the snarling fury of someone who had expected to fly first-class and wound up in coach. This means billions of people will probably die.
Well, a lot more than that happens, as Flash 1 and Flash 2 get carried away zipping back and forth through different realities with crazed slapstick energy, trying to repair the cosmic fallout from those damned tomatoes. In the process of expanding their multiverses, the film pulls off an ingenious reevaluation of all its predecessors and iterations — the Batmans, the Supermans. It almost feels like an exorcism of the whole Justice League franchise, which has always been too stubbornly proud of its heroes’ masochistic suffering. The Marvel films, on the other hand, are closer to quest narratives, usually pressing ahead, forgoing brooding — that’s probably why they’re more fun.
The Flash, though, is fabulous. And Miller is super.
The film opens in theaters June 16.
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