'The Flash' is the most entertaining an IP reset has ever been

Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has spent the last twenty years trying to prove the innocence of his father (Ron Livingston) in the murder of his mother (Maribel Verdú). Using the speed-force, Barry inadvertently travels to another timeline where he no longer has any powers, Batman (Michael Keaton) has retired from crime-fighting and Kara Zor-El / Supergirl (Sasha Calle) landed on Earth instead of Kal-El / Superman. As Barry attempts to return to his own timeline, he realises he has also landed on a key moment in history - the arrival of General Zod (Michael Shannon) to Earth...

To anyone who hasn't been following the dramas surrounding the DC Universe and the corporate musical chairs going on in Warner Bros. at the moment, watching 'The Flash' should be an enjoyable experience because it essentially acts like 'Back To The Future' with superhero cameos.

Indeed, there's an extended joke that the timeline where Barry Allen has landed in just so happens to be the same one where Eric Stoltz - not Michael J. Fox - played Marty McFly in that very movie. Much of the movie is made up of these amusing references and cutaway gags. In fact, the entire finale sees a bunch of cameos and references appear on screen, from long-departed superheroes to superhero castings that never were. Yet, between all of these, there's something kind of lifeless behind it all. Like the weird 3D sculptures that appear whenever Barry Allen tries to travel through time, it all starts to look half-formed and dead behind the eyes the longer you look at it.

Mercifully, 'The Flash' lives up to its name and zips along its two-hour-twenty runtime with ease. Ezra Miller's scattershot performance is buoyed by help from Michael Keaton, who seems to be enjoying the fact that he's still able to comfortably pull off the cape and cowl at 71 and not looking all that ridiculous while he does it. Sasha Calle gives a committed performance as Supergirl, but her role is so completely underdeveloped that she might not have been there at all. Chances are that there was probably another draft of the script where Superman was here, but because of all of the drama with Henry Cavill's Superman, it was a simple find-and-replace in the script. Michael Shannon, though he plays the villainous General Zod, has only a handful of scenes and is played with the kind of intensity that an actor that has long since stopped caring about a character and is taking an easy paycheque instead.

Again, depending on how you look at 'The Flash', it can be a fun time watching all the cameos and characters back on screen together, not to mention hearing Danny Elfman's thunderous score play as Michael Keaton steps out in the Bat-suit. The other way to look at it is that it's wheeling out all these cool, fun moments and wonderfully obscure references to distract you from the real reason why they're all there - to cover the fact that 'The Flash' is resetting the entire DC stable back to zero so that James Gunn and Peter Safran have a clear path for their run at it. To Christina Hodson's credit as screenwriter, using time-travel and the 'Flashpoint' storyline is an ingenious method and Andy Muschietti's direction helps to keep the thing moving rather than getting bogged down in superfluous details.

All in all, 'The Flash' is reasonably enjoyable stuff. The cameos are fun, the time-travel stuff is kept to an appropriate minimum, Ezra Miller's performance is annoying in parts but that's kind of the point, and Michaels Keaton and Shannon both seem to be having fun and earning a decent chunk of money while doing it. Does it need to be perfect? Not really. Does the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe change? Of course it doesn't, don't be daft. 'The Flash' is a grand time at the cinema, just don't read Ezra Miller's Wikipedia article or the Wikipedia article for the movie itself and you'll be fine.