Some fictional characters have pivotal, famous moments in their lives: Theseus has his minotaur. Henry the Fifth made commanding speeches ("We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ..."). Jesus has an encounter with a cross. Spiderman has Uncle Ben's death. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy dislike each other before they fall in love. And the Flash ... the Flash has the death of his mother (and the incarceration of his father). These formative moments have played out in movies and TV so often that we all know them by heart. Some of these I don't mind seeing repeatedly. Others wear on my nerves. I'm sick to death of seeing reboots of Uncle Ben's death. And I'm getting there with Flash's mother.

When it's Shakespeare or Austen, it's on the actors to bring to life a particularly famous set of words. But when the source material is a comic book, some mediocre writer is looking at a history of multiple reboots and attempting to find some new and different way to present the same traumatic event. Both get tiring after a while, but at least the Shakespeare and Austen were written well in the first place ...

This time we open with Flash (Ezra Miller) establishing with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) that he's the last-choice hero of the Justice League, but we still get a huge and ludicrous rescue scene (a collapsing hospital) to remind us yup, he runs fast and is a hero. And then a short cameo from Gal Gadot to remind us of DC's big universe. Then he has a discussion about his ability to wind back time, in which Batman/Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) makes it clear that this would be a bad idea. So Flash rushes off to do exactly that, to save his mom.

He finds himself in another timeline, with another version of himself (younger and even goofier) ... fighting Zod (the returning Michael Shannon). He also ends up powerless, and trying to reassemble the Justice League in this different timeline. Does it go well? Of course not.

I really liked Miller's take on the Flash in "Justice League." (As much as people objected to the original "Justice League," some of the dialogue was really good and quite funny - and I think the Snyder Cut managed to remove most of that.) Having the Flash star in his own own movie has several problems: 1) a little bit of that character went a long way, and an entire movie of this goofy character is too much, a problem aggravated by 2) the writing isn't as good, and 3) Miller has since established themselves as one of Hollywood's premiere assholes, with dozens legal issues to their name.

This also rolls out DC's own version of the multiverse (I think this is its first appearance in a movie?). We have a couple versions of several different people. And so DC moves into the same problematic territory (on film - they both did it long ago in their TV series) that Marvel has already stumbled into. Should we weep for the death of a hero when we know they'll be replicated tomorrow? If Aquaman of Earth-629 dies (I'm mixing DC and Marvel here, and no this didn't happen in this movie), how much do we cry when we know there's another Aquaman sequel from Earth-616 about to be released in three months? Sorry guys: you lose all emotional weight when you kill off a hero and then resurrect them weeks later. See also my review of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," which suffers from the same problem.

It has a lot of jokes that I found didn't hit home, and lots of action that didn't work because it was A) blatantly CG, B) over-the-top, or C) silly. And despite the trauma they were playing for, this has the dramatic heft of a feather. Not a success.