Starring: Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, and Michael Keaton

Directed by Andy Muschietti

Warner Bros., out now on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD

Barry Allen tries to change the past…

So we come to what is effectively one of the last of the big DC films before James Gunn stamps his directorial and creative imprint on the universe. (We have Blue Beetle and the second Aquaman film to come by year end.)

The film suffers for it in the same way Black Adam did.

It also suffers from the obvious troubles its central star, Ezra Miller, brought to the production.

And finally, it clearly suffered from a lack of time to get the special effects right.

So where to start with this turkey of a film?

With the good stuff. There’s some funny jokes and some interesting choices around costume, look and cinematography that were fun, smart and the teams there should absolutely be pleased with the work they delivered.

Additionally, Michael Keaton does just about enough to give this film some kind of centre around which everything else can revolve.

The problems with this film are many but it’s probably best to start with the script and the story itself. This was a couple of turns away from being ready – tonally uneven, overlong and without a clear sense of confrontation at the climax The Flash is a spilled plate of spaghetti. Its ideas are all over the place without the editorial discipline needed to bring the good ideas into sharp focus and cut away the dross.

For instance, we have an opening scene played for laughs that revolved around babies (in a multi-story hospital where, apparently, only one floor has anyone on it and that’s a single nurse and her baby patients). Setting aside the utterly atrocious CGI that rendered the babies worse looking than plastic dolls, the tone here is all fun and jolly only for it then to be entirely switched up moments later with a flat and boring chase involving a virus that could kill half of Gotham.

The film switches like this repeatedly, not least in having an imbecilic version of Barry Allen who is meant to have had a good life but comes across as an entitled fool utterly unaware of anyone else, how they might feel nor even able to understand basic threats to his existence.

Then we have the central threat which is a repeat of Man of Steel but without the charisma of Henry Cavill to make it work. The bizarre choice to repeat the plot of another film without its main star is only just worse than Barry’s actual antagonist who we literally don’t see until the last moment and then they’re gone – with no build up, no explanation, no narrative arc and, weirdly, a terrible bit of writing that requires the enemy do something they physically couldn’t do in order for the whole film to work (without spoiling it, it’s an absolutely terribly example of the bootstrap paradox).

Then we have the side characters. Not Michael Keaton’s Batman or Sasha Calle’s chronically undeveloped Supergirl who both actually do something interesting with what they’re given.

I mean almost every other speaking part. We’re given momentary insights into Barry’s normal life that are laughably bad with characters who serve no purpose, crowd the screen and then are gone. Apart from one hilarious burp by Saoirse-Monica Jackson they are entirely wasted, out of place and distracting.

In the end it feels as if no one who mattered cared enough to make a good film. No one cared enough to edit this down at the script stage, after shooting or during the addition of special effects.

For this to arrive a week or two after the triumphant Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse tells us it’s not tentpole superheroes that are the problem. They can be smart, insightful, touching and thrilling.

The Flash is none of these things. At moments it’s entirely unintentionally funny. At others it’s just baffling as design and narrative choices make you wonder what anyone was thinking.

For example, one person gets shot. Seems likely to cause serious inconvenience, right? However, less than a scene later, the bullet wound is not just no longer a problem, it’s never spoken of again.

Look, for me to take against a film several things have to converge. It can be egregiously bad like Morbius but that was a combination of terrible story with a terrible script with terrible acting. Here we have a production that feels like those who could make a difference just didn’t care, which tainted almost every other aspect of the film.

The 4K edition is the version to get if you’re adding this to your collection: the look and sound is fantastic, and I wondered if further work had been done to the effects subsequent to theatrical release. The value added material includes 90 minutes of podcast, but has some interesting insights as well as histories of the characters in the DC universe (not all of these are on the Blu-ray edition). The Batman feature is, perhaps not surprisingly, the most interesting.

Verdict: It’s a real shame because there are some great ideas in this film with some interesting moments that could have been shaped into something great. Instead, we get spilled spaghetti that no one can be bothered to clean up.

Rating? 4 timelines out of 10

Stewart Hotston and Paul Simpson

The Flash is available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD now.