JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEW THE FLASH:

Heroes used to be the coin of the cinematic realm. The cowboy was a hero. The sheriff was a hero. The cop was a hero. The detective was a hero. Even the wisecracking newspaperman of countless 1930s screwball comedies would be called upon to do something self-sacrificing and noble to prove his worth. People like heroes. They like watching characters they admire. Since the popular culture has decided that men are not really admirable as a rule, and white men for sure aren’t admirable as a rule (while women are admirable as a rule but for their emotional openness and not their use of fists), the motion-picture industry had to default to semi-magical or entirely magical beings to provide viewers with the depictions of heroism they crave.

This is the explanation for the wild success of the superhero movie in the two decades since the first Spider-Man was released in 2002. The superhero is the only pop-culture hero we have left, really. And while the superhero comes in many varieties, including the female variety, the one quality all superheroes share is that they put the interests of others—from the residents of the city they live in, to the people of their entire planet, then of the entire universe, and then of the entire multiverse of universes—above their own.

It is inexplicable, therefore, that the people who make these movies (and TV shows) have chosen to take a bizarre turn in their storytelling by taking the “hero” out of the superhero. The worst-ever Marvel movie, The Eternals, introduced seven new heroes, only to show us how dull, stupid, vain, and lousy they all were. The Disney Plus show called The Falcon and the Winter Soldier spent seven episodes trashing the legacy of Captain America, the noblest of all superheroes, because the serum that made him turned out to be… racist?

This explains the headshaking misfire that is The Flash, a $300 million epic featuring an unattractive, whiny, and off-putting central character who refuses to listen to reason and sets into motion the destruction of all existence everywhere by… running backward?

I wasn’t a comic-book reader so I can’t speak to the faithfulness of this movie’s depiction of Barry Allen in the person of Ezra Miller, an interesting and odd young actor. Miller is now far more famous for personal misbehavior—beating someone up in a bar in Hawaii, accused of grooming a 12-year-old girl, arrested for breaking into and entering a neighbor’s house in Vermont—than for performing. And it’s likely to stay that way.

Doesn’t Hollywood have moral turpitude clauses in their contracts anymore?