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This name of the film at the top of this review is The Flash but it might as well be Batman Returns because that is what I went to see. It is no secret that this movie sees Michael Keaton coming back to the subsequently much shared role that he originated on the big screen in 1989. It is thirty one years since he last wore the black and yellow (an odd second colour to have on the suit when you think about it) but while he has toyed with it elsewhere in his career, notably as Birdman and Vulture, only now has he come back to portray Gotham’s famous vigilante knight properly. From my point of view that is definitely the main draw of this movie.

While they may not quite be my favourite Batman movies (you can’t beat Christopher Nolan’s trilogy), Keaton’s version of Bruce Wayne in the two films he did with Tim Burton is certainly the most interesting of the several there have now been. In his shoes Wayne was depressed but not in a brooding way, his playboy millionaire was a man who struggled to relate to people but didn’t dwell in his isolation. He was almost on the spectrum which definitely makes sense for a guy who dresses as an animal to fight crime. There was also no superiority in him, which is not the case with Ben Affleck’s portrayal (an aspect that is actually directly referenced in this movie). All of this somehow made him more of a hero, and there is no doubt it made him relatable.

Bringing Keaton back as Batman is not an original move, this whole film owes an incredible debt to Spider-Man No Way Home, but it does work. He doesn’t come into the film until an hour in, and I am not sure I am entirely on board with some aspects of his new characterisation but it does aim to build on those established traits I just talked about. When he joins the action though it is a treat. I don’t think this is just because of the nostalgic value; he is a more engaging presence than many of those that have come after him, both when he is talking and when he is fighting. Affleck’s Batman, who has fought alongside side this Flash before, is also in the movie so the comparison is easy to make and the new guy doesn’t come out of it so well. (He’s not even the newest of course; Warner Brothers now have three versions of Batman on active duty.)

Showing the old Batmobile again is absolutely a move designed to bring back memories, they don’t even drive it. There is a new Batwing as well that is very cool, having both retro and modern qualities. If you are similarly here for Michael Keaton’s Caped Crusader then, well have at it. You won’t be disappointed.

You won’t be disappointed in him, anyway. The rest of this farrago is a bit more mixed.

First off you’ve got Ezra Miller as the lead. By all accounts Ezra Miller is not a nice dude, whose off screen behaviour did run the risk of this whole thing being buried (which would have been tough on Keaton after the other movie he reprised his Batman for, Batgirl, was already shot then binned). The strap line for Burton’s second Batman movie was famously ‘The Bat, The Cat, The Penguin’ but what with Keaton, Miller and Sacha Calle, who was cast at least partly for how she fitted into that skinny supersuit, this could have been advertised with the tag ‘The Bat, The Prat, The Pen Thin’. (More on Calle later.) The film does not dial back on Miller’s involvement though, unlike the last Fantastic Beasts movie which you could tell was planning to write the character out of later instalments just in case (which ultimately turned out to be optimistic rather than pessimistic). Even aside of those real life actions, Ezra’s Barry is quite an acquired taste and there is a lot of them here.

Next you have the narrative logic which often leaves something to be desired. Barry discovers he can run faster than the speed of light which sends him back in time and leads to the creation of… yes, you’ve guessed it, multiverses, hence the two (or more?) different Batmans. I seriously wonder if Hollywood is on a mission to make infinite movies about infinite multiverses. There is no explanation of how Barry then travels back to the future though.

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I also have to talk about the CGI in this film, which in places is simply abysmal. I don’t think I’ve seen computer effects this bad since the 80s. It makes The Last Starfighter look like Gravity. There are some successful bits in this respect but there are two sequences where it’s unbelievably bad, one at either end of the movie. The big action denouement takes place in an environment that looks like someone ate all of the paint, confetti, marbles, plasticine and etch-a-sketches in the world and then violently threw it all up, and then from this arena emerges various familiar, and some sadly departed, faces. It could be that the rendering of these people, all of these people – even those that I am sure would have happily turned up on set to be filmed rather than created with visual effects, is meant to be caricatured so that there is no accusation of trying to create proper representations of those that are no longer with us. It is my belief that this was the intention with Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. If I’m honest I don’t believe it is the intention here though. All of the people we see here look like exiles from SimCity.

Even if it this were the plan here, they don’t have that excuse when we see The Flash saving a load of tiny infants falling out of the window of a hospital near the start. In defence of the unconvincing images here the director has said ‘well, you didn’t want to see a lot of photo- real newborns tumbling through the air did you?’. Actually Andy Muschietti, yes I did. At least more than more than I wanted to see a load of those dancing oogachacka babies from that 90s viral video flying around.

There is a surprisingly emotional end to the resolution of the story too, which could have had immense power if it had played out properly. There are lots of interesting ideas here but like those rubber faces babies, none of them land with any impact.

The Ripley Factor:

The entire plot revolves around loving your mum, but that’s not where the representations of women need to be examined. As is also shown in all of the publicity, this movie brings Supergirl to modern movie audiences. As already hinted, her outfit leans more toward female objectification than it needs to but Calle is good and she explodes onto the screen exactly as you’d hoped. Sadly this fizzles out though and ultimately the promise goes unrealised as she is reduced to being there just to serve the man’s story. It is sadly a waste of an excellent feminist character. The way she ends the film is decidedly disappointing.

It is a shame that the studio that actually lead the way with contemporary cinema’s portrayals of female superheroes with Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman has dropped the ball here. Gadot is evidently still around, waiting for the call, but as the DC universe goes off in a different direction I fear this might be where it ends.

The Flash is such a mixed bag. All in all it is quite fun but there is so much of it that could have been so much better.

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Here we go, just for old time’s sake: