Consensus on the cancellation-threshold is as far away as ever: Phillip Schofield languishes in disgrace while Ezra Miller stars in a $190m movie despite a record of toxic and erratic behaviour involving the police and the courts. It has been a bizarre string of events, in the course of which reports suggested at one stage Miller’s arresting officer contritely explained to the suspect why he had not used their correct non-binary pronouns.
It might conceivably have been interesting to report that Miller brought this dark chaos to the new superhero film from the DC Extended Universe, playing the Flash, otherwise Barry Allen, endowed with superspeed and part of the Justice League, and in his human persona battling to get his father off the wrongful charge of murdering his mother. But despite some diverting touches, Miller’s smirking, gurning, mugging doppelganger performance is a trial and in any case gets lost in the inevitable third-act CGI battle apocalypse, which is weightlessly free of jeopardy and, like the rest of the film, does not exactly go by in a flash.
