Blue Beetle has heart but not much else.

jeromereviews1994

Sep 30

Jaime Reyes suddenly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology called the Scarab. When the Scarab chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he's bestowed with an incredible suit of armor that's capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the superhero Blue Beetle.

Blue Beetle is the third DCEU film to be released this year and I can at least give the movie this it was better than Shazam: Fury Of The Gods and The Flash…that is still not saying much because Blue Beetle isn't much better.

What Blue Beetle's whole concept of family themes is a really strong idea, it's been done numerous times before in a lot of comic book movies but at least with a handful of scenes Blue Beetle attempts to make the idea it's own. There's some genuinely solid performances from Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine and George Lopez, the heartfelt moments between the members of the family are undeniably beautiful and have so much emotion too them. The film bringing out the heart and family dynamic from the film works so much stronger than the typical comic book movie parts of the film.

Which is unfortunately where the movie lands into generic territory, it doesn't do anything really exciting with it's action scenes despite having interesting framing, there's some neat shots here with some neon lighting but the movie doesn't do anything with it. They kind of just throw in a handful of generic action scenes and don't do anything else, combine that with such dull villains that really don't get any sort of character outside of one or two personality traits and you have a ton of action scenes that are hard for the viewer to cling on to.

I don't think Blue Beetle is a bad movie it's just a bit of a disappointment, with every interesting choice the movie makes and actually executes quite well (including some darker moments.) there's a lot of playing too safe towards the end of the movie, where it starts to morph into the usual below average comic book movie.

Blue Beetle is available on all VOD platforms.

5/10 C