The Flash: DC goes to back to the future with this movie equivalent of a greatest hits album

The Flash (M, 144 mins) Directed by Andy Muschietti ***½

I’m not the biggest AC/DC fan in the world. Though with the right number of beers and decent company, I’ll still yell “woohoo” when I hear the opening riff of Thunderstruck, just like any good son of Te Awamutu must.

But there is one thing I love about that band: They have never put out a greatest hits compilation. Neither have Tool, Metallica or, err, Katy Perry. Which must be the basis of a pretty decent pub quiz question, surely?

There’s even a quote from some famous musician, even if Google can’t find it tonight, along the lines of “once you put out a greatest hits, you’re just wringing cash out of old ideas.”

With the vinyl resurgence, that probably still holds true. A band or a musician can still make a whole new pile, with a gussied up re-release of some classics.

But in the movie business, not so much. The days of the DVD box-set and the “director’s cut” are long gone. So what’s a struggling Hollywood producer to do, when he’s down to his last billion and the wolves are howling at the gates of the compound in Malibu? Well, if you’re Marvel or DC, apparently you invent the multiverse, that’s what.

In hindsight, maybe we should have seen Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness for what they were – Marvel admitting they didn’t have another Avengers: Endgame to offer us and never would. So here’s a bunch of greatest hits and remixes for you to spend your money on.

I cheered as much as anyone when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire turned up to help out Tom Holland’s Spidey. But I also remember hoping that bringing old favourites back via the flimsy excuse of a multiverse wasn’t going to become the new superhero movie normal.

Yeah. Good luck with that Tuckett.

Listen, The Flash isn’t a bad film at all. The first third or so, with young Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) still finding his feet as a fully fledged member of Justice League, yields some good moments and one stupendously over-the-top rescue scene in a collapsing hospital ward full of newborns. Even if it did make me think how much better John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat made the same gag work in the immortal Hard Boiled in 1992.

There’s even one genuinely laugh-out-loud moment from Ben Affleck’s present-day Batman, snagged in Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth and saying “maybe I should have done more to combat poverty”.

After that promising opening stanza, The Flash takes us, via some convenient time travel, into an alternative reality and back to a couple of moments when DC were on really solid ground. General Zod has arrived from the ruins of Krypton and is looking for Superman, just like he was in Man of Steel in 2013 when this Justice League story arc began.

And in this timeline, Batman is a retiree who’s greatest days were three decades ago. He’s played, of course, by Michael Keaton.

With a grasp of physics the makers of Hot Tub Time Machine would call a bit ramshackle, The Flash winds its way through lengthy sequences of set-pieces. The best of these is set in a Russian base in the Arctic and for a moment had me hoping DC were introducing the Red Son storyline into the franchise. No such luck, but the sequence is still a stunner, with a pleasing outcome.

The Flash is a mixed film. I can be cynical about the blatant fan-service driving it. And yet, DC desperately needs a sense of direction. Any direction.

There is a history of bands putting out a greatest hits album as a way of announcing an era is over and they’ll be heading in a fresh direction from now on. Which, now I think about it, is probably why AC/DC have never put one out.

If this is how new studio head James Gunn intends to re-set DC’s core cast and move forward, then good luck to him.

After previews in select cinemas on Wednesday night, The Flash opens nationwide on Thursday, June 15.