The Flash

"The Flash" has finally made its way to Netflix and so, being at something of a loose end, I've gradually watched my way through it. It is offensively bad.

Firstly, though, there are some good things:

• Seeing Keaton back as Batman is really good fun. In fact, all three of the Batmans in this film do really good turns, with two of them giving their best-ever performances in the role.
• Similarly, Sasha Calle is really good as Kara. There's not much too the role, and they seem to be doing a weird take on the "Red Son" Superman comic, but that's fine - she does well with the material she is given.

And that's it. There are many, many bad things (spoilers from here):

• Basing a film about a character whose main trait is that he is annoying is an... interesting choice. To base it around two instances of that character, each more annoying than the other is not a good idea.
• The CGI looks terrible. Seriously, it is genuinely woeful at times. I've seen AI-generated videos that are streets ahead. The zombie cameo by Christopher Reeve is the absolute worst of them all, and the one that leads me to call the film offensively bad, but it's far from being the only offense.
• As with all time-travel films, it has a scene detailing the "rules" of time travel for the universe. As with all time-travel films, they're utter nonsense. However, these have absolutely no rhyme or reason... and serve to make the events of the film impossible even in-universe (if changing time affects both the future and the past then you can never again get back to the point that you've changed - the point in time no longer exists).
• There's a comic book trope called "women in refrigerators" where a woman exists in a story solely to die offscreen in a suitably horribly manner and thus motivate the (inevitably male) hero into action. "The Flash" features a particularly egregious version of this: the action is motivated by Barry's desire to prevent the murder of his mother (which happens off-screen). He does so, but Nora Allen is then given all of two scenes in the film, absolutely no character development, and indeed we learn basically nothing about her other than that she's "nice" (and that from the perspective of her son, so hardly an unbiased source). And then, as in so many time travel films, the resolution is to go and put things back the way they were - back into the fridge with her! (And to compound things, having learned his lesson not to meddle with time, Barry decides "what the hell" and does so anyway, this time managing to save his father, who had been falsely accused of the murder all along. I'm not saying there's a double standard or anything, but...)

Anyway, that's that. It's not the absolute worst film I've ever seen, or even the worst I've watched all the way through. But it's right up there. Avoid.