The Barry Allen Flash (Matt Bomer) is vibrating too hard (or something) while trying to catch a kryptonite bullet meant for Superman and finds himself sucked into what he first assumes to be the past, World War II. There, he teams up with a JSA version led by an - apparently Eastern European going by her accent - Wonder Woman (Stana Katic).
Theoretically to kick Nazi butt, but the weird, episodic plotting of this animated movie eventually provides other butts to kick.
The whole thing, as directed by Jeff Wamester, is a rather middling affair, animated with a kind of cell-shade look that never quite commits and ends up looking weirdly generic for the approach, decently – but not better – voiced, and which suffers from a pretty weak script by Jeremy Adams and Meghan Fitzmartin. There are several problems here: first, there’s the whole Future (actually SPOILER) Flash angle that adds exactly nothing to the World War II business, has no pay-off except one of those interminable valuable lessons to be learned (that is to say, an anti-payoff). Hell, Barry doesn’t even have anything of import to do in the grand finale at all, and is probably only in the movie because someone higher up in the development ladder became afraid the audience might be confused by a film headlined by Wonder Woman (I am being sarcastic here). The Barry business takes up quite a bit of valuable space, too, so there’s not enough left for the short hand characterisation of most of the rest of the cast beyond Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, so that their supposed character arcs all seem to have a beginning and an end but no middle whatsoever, destroying the impact of something like a less heroic becoming the Superman, and killing most of the emotional beats in the climax stone cold dead.
There’s little dramatic flow to the narrative in general, and the second half of the film seems to belong to rather a different movie than the first one altogether. At least it’s one with more interesting set pieces.
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