 The Flash is finally in theaters, although I feel like I've been seeing it leaked online for the last few months, and I've already reviewed it. So now I want to do spoilers, I want to give you my thoughts on all the crazy crap that took place in it, and I would absolutely love to talk about the commentary about this film and the pathetic man-babies online who have gone out of their way to try to destroy this movie for their own pathetic reasons. Let's talk about The Flash. Before I dive into the spoilers of this film, I need to point out some things that are going on online, and it really is online, where a lot of people like to live their lives now to their fullest and not in the real world. That's okay, you do you, whatever. The problem is, when you live online, you tend to hear a lot of different rumors and take them as fact, or make judgments before any ruling has actually been given out. Such is the case with Ezra Miller, who a lot of the vitriol is focused against. Now, I'm not an Ezra Miller fan. I don't really like him as an actor, although I think he's great in this, and as a person, he seems like a total shit show. There's been a lot of allegations made about him being a groomer, about him having a cult, about him skirting the laws and all that stuff. Sounds terrible. Shame on this person for doing these things, if this is really happening. I don't know if he's actually been convicted of a lot of the stuff that's being thrown out there, but if it's true, disgusting individual, get his ass out of Hollywood, get his ass in a prison or wherever he belongs. That said, boycotting the movie and shaming people for seeing it is ridiculous. The same way it's ridiculous to listen to Michael Jackson music, or wear a pair of Nike shoes, or many of the clothes that you wear. Spoiler, there's still a lot of sweatshops in the world. Are you using an iPhone or an Android? Guess what? You're part of the problem, according to these people. But you're not the one doing the deed itself. There is separation, and if we're to judge a movie based on the character of one of the actors in it, you're gonna have a hard time watching any movie today full stop. That out of the way, I don't truly believe that's the reason why many people aren't seeing the film. I think that as far as the online characters go, it's the stupid Snyder cult that's responsible. Now, there are healthy people that like the Snyder movies. I like some of the Zack Snyder movies in the DCEU. He did some good things. I like the visuals. I like some of the casting he did. Great stuff. This is a reasonable, healthy way to talk about films. What's not reasonable or healthy is going on Twitter and making Fire James Gunn a hashtag that goes viral every single week, because you are pathetic and don't have a life. Now I understand right now, I'm not even talking to a lot of people that are watching this video. They're probably like, what do you want about Twitter? I'm not on Twitter. That's good. But I live in a little bit of this fantasy world, so I see this stuff. I see the reviews and I see the spoilers that come out. These jackasses were releasing footage from this movie months before it came out, showing the spoilers. I had a couple things ruined. I wasn't happy about it. I mean, I'm not huge on Flash anyway, so it wasn't like the end of the world, of course. But still, there are people that love this character. They love this franchise of the DCEU, and they just wanted to go and clean. And these pathetic jerks are so miserably sad that Zack Snyder is no longer making movies in the DCEU. He's walked away long ago. They haven't. How long do you keep the charade going? How long do you keep this grift going where you can impress your other friends online by peacocking about every new DCEU movie or DCEU movie that comes out under James Gunn? We're not even under Gunn yet. We're not even under him yet. We still have two more movies that are outside of his control, Blue Beetle Aquaman 2. Yes, of course, he's now in charge and overseeing things, but these movies were well into production, well underway before he stepped in to the big boy pants. And even if Gunn wasn't hired on to do the new slate, whoever was put in charge, they would have absolutely crapped all over. Unless Zack Snyder was put back and King again to make all of these movies. It's such a sad, pathetic state of affairs. These people are the worst. They're not movie fans. They're just in this embarrassing cult that their leader is not even part of. What they do though is they lead to some really crappy discourse. They preset the tone by saying the movie's trash months before it comes out, years before it comes out. It's a complete mess. It turns people away because they get pushed in the algorithm. They get pushed on these media sites because they're saying such polarizing things. Let's push them in the trash bin where they belong. Now, if you don't like the flash, I completely understand. There's plenty of things to criticize. I had a good time with it. I had a lot of fun with it. It was a comic book movie through and through. It had some genuine heart. It had a lot of emotion. It had good performances. The effects are insane. They look terrible at times. Very funny at times. But I didn't care. I was along for the ride. If you're not, though, and if you're not into the performances or the storyline or if you're a big fan of the comics and they didn't do it justice, that's all fair play. These are all reasonable things to get hung up on. So let's talk about it for a little bit now that I've had this big preamble. The flash starts out for the first 20 minutes, absolutely firing on all cylinders to use a cheesy catchphrase that's been drug into the ground. We start with our lead character, Barry, who just wants to get some sustenance. He needs it because he's burning fuel so ridiculously fast. He's running faster than the speed of sound, the speed of light itself. We're greeted to a title card that's having a hard time forming because he's getting interrupted by Alfred, by augurs on the side of the street, by on the barista and not able to get a sandwich order right. It's very funny. I think it does a great job opening up and setting the tone for the flick. A tone that will stay very consistent throughout. The colors are punchier than we're used to from the DC, you know, the early DCU. They're definitely more on Shazam side of things. I think the production is a little nicer, though. And things get really wild really fast. I was not expecting the flash to have to run to a building as it's collapsing and save like six babies from falling to their death. But that's exactly what I got. He goes into insane slow motion as he's running up this thing. The effects are pretty slick. The babies look terrible. They are nightmare fuel. That I don't know how you make babies look so unrealistic in 2023. But kudos to the animation department. Did you have a week to work on this? Come on. Regardless, I said this in my regular review. This movie oftentimes reminded me of Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer or some of those really insane, silly loony tunes type flicks. And this has the same kind of animation approach to it. People are constantly getting hit in the air and rag dolly in sideways. Has a very 2008, 2009 feel to it. And I dig that movie. I dig both those movies. This was right up my alley. You look at something like Scott Pilgrim versus The World even. That movie looks phenomenal. Has great acting. Everything's really sharp in that flick. But there's tons of zany over the top moments that are really cheesy on purpose, really sell what's going on. And the flash is right there for me. He's putting a baby in a microwave so it doesn't smash its head down even though it would still be smashing around in the microwave, but whatever. The point isn't so much the science behind it. It's more so that Barry's thinking through things. He's been in the game long enough. He's a superhero through and through that this is old hat for him. And what else is old hat is the scars he has internally from his mom dying and his dad rotting away in prison for her murder. A murder he presumably didn't commit. He says he's innocent. Barry believes him. Is he? Well, we'll find out later. He is innocent. I was actually surprised. I'm like, okay, so he did it. We don't ever find out who the killer is. That was one thing that kind of troubled me. I was like, what's the twist with this? Who actually killed her? We don't find that out. Which I thought was a little annoying. Like why wouldn't he try to figure out who murdered her? And I guess in a sense that's actually refreshing and kind of cool. It's not a revenge story. It's a redemption story for his dad. And it's a story about trying to keep his mom alive, which I think every single person on the planet can somehow relate to. We all have someone we love and care about to see them die early. In a situation that you could have prevented. It's heartbreaking. While the baby saving stuff is going on, we have Bruce Wayne Ben Affleck. Back in this bat flak is here. He's better than ever. Not only is he in the cool bat cycle, flying around doing his thing. We also see him swinging, jumping on a bridge, going over cars. It's cool. It's nice seeing him doing some kick ass stuff. There is no point in this movie where he's killed over on the ground in pain, looking like he just came out of a scene from Full House. Oh. I almost forgot. There is a Wonder Woman cameo too. I think it's so sad that every time Diana shows up, there's that. Oh. Like her dumb ass theme music that maybe at one point was cool. I never liked it personally. It's always accompanying her. Can we just have her show up with something else playing outside of the chanting that's been done to death with the guitar? Mm. Hello, I'm back. Somehow Gal Gadot gets worse at acting every time she's on screen. I don't know what's going on if she's just deflated playing the character because she's nothing but a glorified cameo anymore. If Wonder Woman 1984 is still just rotting her brain away, I don't blame her if that's the case. Yeah, she shows up though and she's gone before you know it. And now we're off to the races. Quite literally. Flash runs through time itself, ends up in this cool little multi-versal spaghetti thread thing where he can see different things going on and he ends up going back to his childhood when he's, I don't know, 19, I think, 18, 19 years old. He's in college. He's at the dinner table with his mom. He sees his younger self coming up and this is where we have, I think some pretty cool visual tricks going on. Not perfect, there's definitely times when you can see the face swap going on but I think 99% of the time it's pretty slick because we have two Ezra Miller's now on display for the rest of this movie. The current wise flash and the young immature stupid flash. Much like Shazam, I feel like Ezra Miller as the younger version of himself is playing more of a nine-year-old than that of a 19-year-old. They're really hamming it up. Like, yo, what's up, dude? I'm going to school. That's Cap. He didn't say Cap because that's not something white people said in the 90s. Barry quickly explains to himself the situation they're in and how young Barry needs to get the flash powers. In order to do so, they have to recreate the situation, which means going to a science lab, sitting behind a bunch of chemicals and letting that lightning smash through there, hit him in the chest, giving them these abilities. You got the touch. You got the power. Unfortunately, it goes through his chest, hits current Barry, which makes him lose his. So we have ourselves a freaky Friday situation when it comes to powers. I did graze over some of the dramatic elements, which I think are peaked to this movie. The scenes where he and his mom are together, top notch. The flashback where he's a child with his parents, it's touching stuff. When he sees her at the supermarket, it's really well done. I liked it. I like how he's going to slow motion. It didn't feel creepy like it felt in the Snyder Cut, you know, the four-hour-long Snyder Cut where everything goes slow motion and he sees the girl in the car with the hot dogs and he's like touching her hair and blowing her kisses. It's just very creepy, very, very unnatural. Here it's done much, much better. Okay, young Barry gets his powers. This leads to a bunch of shenanigans where he's getting his clothes blown off because he's running too fast. He doesn't understand how to use his powers. He's warging through walls or whatever that's called. By the way, the way they show that stuff, how the molecules all break up and go through the wood fibers, very cool. There is a lot of creative shots in this flick. Yes, there's a lot of really bad CG and green screen stuff, but the creativity is on another level here. In my opinion, there is some stuff that I haven't seen in any other superhero movie being done pretty damn well. Once they get the powers somewhat under control, he's going to find out that they are in the timeline where Zod is about to destroy downtown Metropolis. Is it Metropolis, is that right? It doesn't matter. Downtown city and Superman is gonna save him by helping him kill hundreds, if not thousands of people in the process. This time, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the man of steel isn't here. He died. And what they have to work with is Kara, super girl who's being held in a maximum security prison. They don't know it's a girl at the time. They're looking for the man of steel. In order to bust her out, they're gonna need some help. Aquaman's not alive. He wasn't created because of the rift and the timeline that the Flash created. Wonder Woman's on sabbatical. Cyborg hasn't gotten his powers yet. There's a lot of stuff going on that no one's around is the bottom line, except Michael Keaton as Batman. Road trip. The Flash's head on over to Wayne Manor to convince him to join the cause, only to find out this isn't Ben Affleck at all. This is a much older guy. This is a much better actor with a lot more charisma. We're talking Michael Keaton, baby. Keaton, by the way, hasn't missed a beat. He's still just as smooth, just as witty, just as fantastic as ever before. We get an okay little kitchen fight scene where they do their best to cover up his face because clearly Keaton isn't as spry as the gentleman who's performing these acrobatic feats we see before us. He inevitably agrees to help out like they always do after sharing some of his backstory, which is all very well done. This is one of the few times where they bring back one of the old guard characters from 20 or 30 years ago, and they don't ruin them outright. This isn't Luke Skywalker dying on a rock alone after doing a Skype call into a different planet. No, this Bruce Wayne is ready for combat. He's ready to actually go into the battle, into the fray, and lay down his life if needed, which he will do like a thousand, if not a million times over, we will find out. We now enter the Supergirl portion of the flick. This stuff is all really cool. They drop down via the bat plane, get a nice silhouette shot of Bruce Wayne heading in, and he gets a kick-ass fight. We haven't seen him move like this in the Tim Burton movies due to obvious limitations with the costume and just with the effects at the time. We're talking about a movie that came out in the 90s. It's been a while. He showcases that he really hasn't missed a step. They're now ready to bust soups out of a giant testicle as one of the berries points out, but when they open this cage, they find out it's actually a smoking hot Burnett of the female variety. And this is not the Supergirl fans are probably familiar with. She's not happy-go-lucky. She's not taking selfies. She's very down in the dumps. She's been beaten, tortured. She's got kryptonite weakening her, and she has to get to the sun, which they thankfully are able to do pretty easily after blowing out of dodge, getting back to the surface, and having to take out an army of guys. Kara, now repowered, reinvigorated, does this in Superman fashion. Get in some pretty heavy shades of the Matrix reloaded here as CG Kara's punching people. He looks pretty bad, pretty bad ass. I don't mind cartoons. I watch them all the time. As long as the story's cool, as long as the characters are fun and have chemistry together, I'm invested, these people do. Barry One realizes he's nothing without his powers. So they head on over to the Bruce Wayne Laboratory and Frankenstein this dude back together. They strap him to an electric chair and pop out a Batman kite. Yeah, there's plenty of camp in this film. And the electrocute is ass, which doesn't work. Kara, Supergirl, has to fly him up into the clouds and let him take on the bolt head on. This one thankfully does the trick. And now we head into the final half hour of the film, which is nonstop action. In the most boring setting imaginable, it's just a desert. And not even a desert with sand dunes, it's just a flat ass desert. Like it couldn't be less interesting if it tried, but there is enough kick-ass action going on that you can kind of forgive it. Not fully. It is still pretty pathetic that they couldn't come up with something better for a landscape around here. This is like a Windows 95 screensaver. It's just a flat, dry ground with blue sky. They get to take on Zod again, like in Man of Steel, but this time he's pretty boring. This reminded me of Thanos from Avengers Infinity War to Endgame. In Endgame, Thanos is boring. He doesn't have that character depth or intrigue he had in Infinity War. Doesn't get any cool lines. He's really more of a stock villain. And that's how Zod is. Very one dimensional, kind of boring. It was fun to see him back again, but eh, eh, eh, not really anything there. What makes this section fun though, is how it all goes spectacularly wrong. Batman's killed, Supergirl's killed, and Flash is left with his dick in his hand, not accomplishing a single thing, but actually making things far worse with Zod, now victorious. He and his other self are able to run back in time and try again, and try again. And again, and again, and again, and this goes on for an eternity because second Flash, Flash 2.0, young Flash, he will not give up. Whereas OG Barry realizes the game is over. There is no scenario where everyone wins. Someone has to die. And it's gotta be his mom, or things are gonna get way, way worse for everyone else. This stuff's pretty sweet though, because we see the third Barry come into play who is just disfigured, he's wracked, he's been doing this for an eternity. Looks awful. He keeps going back to the point where he's pulling in all the different universes that are literally colliding into each other, and this is where fanservice runs amuck. And some people criticize the flick for this. It's such a small portion of the movie, it's so minuscule, it doesn't matter. And of course there's gonna be hardcore that really love this stuff, there's gonna be others scratching their head at the cameos. I was kind of indifferent. I was somewhere in the middle. I got a good, when Nicholas Cage showed up as Superman. I believe George Miller was attached to do a Justice League movie at one point, and that was gonna be his choice for Superman. Regardless, very funny scene CG Nicholas Cage as Superman fighting a giant spider character, which I'm sure comic book fans know the name of, but to me is a giant spider alien. And then we have Christopher Reeve showing up as Superman, even Supergirl tags along. Very, very weird, very Carrie Fisher, all a princess Leia in Rogue One. It looked okay. I just, I don't know about all this stuff. It's so unnecessary. If anything, just maybe show their backs, so you don't have to do the surreal bizarreness of using their likeness. I don't know, it feels a little gross to me, but this is where we're at now. It's a brave new world where anybody can be deep faked or sieged into anything without their, I guess, explicit approval. There's references to the Joker. I think we have the TV show, Barry show up at one point or another. I never watched the show, but I'm sure that's something that was in there. There's a lot of stuff going on, and I'm sure there's even more Easter eggs in all these different windows and times flying around the flash. When all is said and done, Barry actually did accomplish something though. He kept the timeline basically contained, and he was able to free his dad from prison. He did so by just moving a can of tomato sauce up at the end, instead of putting it in the cart, which he initially did, because then the dad wouldn't have to go out and get tomato sauce, causing the killer to break in. This time he was there to save his wife. This was such a cool way of handling the situation, such a simple kind of elegant way of handling it, and I thought it was fantastic. And then we have the final shot, the final reveal of the film, where he's gonna meet Bruce Wayne again, his old buddy, Ben Affleck, but then everyone disperses in the crowd, and we see it's no other than George Clooney. This is a hilarious ending to the flick, a flick that already told us in the first 20 minutes that it was gonna be a silly romp. He's saving babies, putting them in microwaves for crying out loud. It was perfect to end on a reference to Batman Forever. Absolutely perfect. I thought it was great. So did the guy that was seeing a couple rows up that every 20 minutes would jump up and go, yeah, references. I wish I was that happy about anything ever. I was happy about this movie though. I'm actually excited to see it again with the rest of my family. They didn't see it. I wasn't sure how it was gonna shake out, but now that I know it's awesome, my daughter and son will absolutely love it. I think my wife even would, because she's not huge into superhero cape shit, but she likes a good drama. She likes a little nostalgia here and there. She likes Michael Keaton, so it's got enough to pull her in. Now let me know if it had enough to pull you in. Did you like the movie? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Am I completely off base? That's fine. It's subjective after all. Put your opinion in the comments below. Please like the video if you had a good time and I would love if you hit that subscribe button and stick around. I post tons of movie content each and every week. I'd like to have more eyes on the channel. All right, we'll see you next time.