Long story short, the two rapidly join forces, dust off the Batcave tech, furrow their brows and suit up, as other members of the DC stock company join the party, including Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle). Having hung up his Bat-suit in his reality (while DC has repeatedly rebooted the franchise in ours), Bruce appears to have entered the Howard Hughes chapter of his cosseted life when Barry drops by. It’s a conceit that pays off the second a shambolic Michael Keaton makes his entrance as a graybeard puttering about a near-derelict Wayne Manor. 123, these versions of the Flash (there are others) discover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an idea this movie, well, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles hang like a cloud over this movie.) Some of the Flash’s appeal, of course, is also baked into the original comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (via creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and almost feverishly charismatic presence. As is usually the case with superhero movies, the story is nonsensical and convoluted - it’s no wonder a character uses a tangle of cooked spaghetti to try to explain a major plot point - but not calamitously so. 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 prison for killing Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú). It’s smartly cast, ambitious and relatively brisk at 2 1/2 hours. “The Flash” is one of the more watchable ones. If the bludgeoning feels more inescapable these days, it’s partly because the major studios now bank so heavily on superhero movies. That may be true, though movies have long employed spectacle - pyrotechnics, lavish set pieces - to bait, hook and bludgeon the audience so it keeps begging for more. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a workout, smacking you around with their shocks and awesomeness, though it sometimes feels as if contemporary superhero movies have taken this kind of pummeling to new extremes. That’s a relief, particularly given how the movie tries to clobber you into submission. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when things go bigger and grimmer here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this type, he retains a playful weightlessness. He’s really, really fast on his feet, you bet. Out of uniform, he is a normie, a goof and kind of endearing. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (aka a billionaire), but an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks by accident, not by birthright or by design. The Flash, the latest DC Comics superhero to get his very own big show, isn’t the outfit’s usual brooding heavyweight.
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