Barry Allen uses his super speed to change the past, but his attempt to save his family creates a world without super heroes, forcing him to race for his life in order to save the future.

A solo movie for ‘The Flash’ seemed like a logical next step after ‘Justice League’, with a chance to establish a new superhero after the moderately successful attempts to elevate ‘Wonder Woman’ and ‘Aquaman’ to the status already built into Batman and Superman. That was before a variety of controversies surrounding star Ezra Miller, which has clouded the development of the movie and led to questions around whether the movie would even be released (given ‘Batgirl’ was scrapped entirely, it wouldn’t have been unheard of). Usually when a movie has such a controversial development it ends up being a mess (hey, not everything can be ‘Apocalypse Now’) so my expectations weren’t exactly high, and perhaps that played a part in how much I ended up enjoying this – certainly a nice comic book antidote to the poor output from Marvel in the last couple of years.

In terms of the plot, this is essentially an origin story for Barry Allen aka The Flash, who a lot of people will be less familiar with. We meet him in his 20s and learn about his tragic backstory that is pretty standard for most comic book heroes, and it’s that backstory that drives him to experiment with going back in time to remove this tragedy from his past. I suspect we’ve all seen enough movies to know by now that trying to change the past has unintended consequences, and that is what drives much of this movie. Miller, personal issues aside, is really good in essentially a dual role playing two versions of The Flash, and I felt the story zipped along nicely with a good dose of humour and some nice callbacks to the past and unrealised developments in DC’s history. One of those developments involves a welcome return for Michael Keaton’s iteration of Batman, and it’s a shame we won’t see more of him in the role due to ‘Batgirl’ being discarded.

‘The Flash‘ does have its faults, starting with some poor quality CGI which at times feels like a throwback to 90s movies, and like many movies that involve time travel it does end up tying itself in a knot that the writers can’t figure a way out of which hurts the final act. That being said, this is much better than I expected and it was good fun watching a comic book movie that was enjoyable on its own merits without feeling like it was in service of a larger franchise goal.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Andy Muschietti

Starring: Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdu, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Jeremy Irons, Temuera Morrison, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa and Michael Keaton

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439572/