The Flash: 24 WTF Moments

The Flash's long, arduous journey to the big screen is finally over - the superhero epic is out now worldwide, and has received broadly positive reviews from most critics for its fun-yet-flawed multiversal shenanigans.

Love it or hate it, though, The Flash is certainly an incredibly weird beast of a movie that you're not likely to forget any time soon.

Packed to the brim with absolutely unhinged comic relief, a tidal wave of hit-and-miss fan service, and some of the jankiest CGI in recent blockbuster history, this is a regularly eyebrow-raising experience of a film.

It's a whole lotta movie for better and worse, bringing some much needed personality to a franchise that's so often been accused of being aggressively dour and joyless.

But there's also plenty of excess here, director Andy Muschietti throwing seemingly every thinly-sketched idea in his head into the movie, leading to an end product that's both giddy good fun and grossly overstuffed.

In the very least, that potentially gruelling 144-minute runtime mostly zips by thanks to the rat-a-tat pacing and the consistency with which it fleets from one wild scenario to the next...

In its opening moments, The Flash lets you know just how irreverent it's going to be, as Barry (Ezra Miller) heads off to stop a group of terrorists and prevent an unstable hospital skyscraper from collapsing.

As Barry prepares to speed his way to the scene, the movie's title begins fading into the screen, but before it can fully appear, he's interrupted by a nearby teenager who throws a chocolate bar at his head, causing the title to immediately disappear.

After a brief comedic exchange with the culprit, a famished Barry gets back to the job at hand, once again gearing up to speed off, with the movie's title successfully fading into the screen in full this time.

Even for a multiverse movie, that's a surprisingly meta flourish right from the jump.