Blue Beetle (2023)

Blue Beetle (2023)

 

5/10

Starring

Xolo Maridueña

Adriana Barraza

Damián Alcázar

Raoul Max Trujillo

 

Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto

 

 

I enjoyed it enough to not think it is the worst superhero film I have seen. The film tries to step up sometimes, but it is hindered by trying to anchor itself in not allowing itself to get too dark. This hindrance is why this film did not reach the needed potential you would expect. It seemed stuck in that cheesy, I am a good guy I cannot kill trend that it becomes annoying.

Then as usual threw in the cheesy trend of, you try to hurt my family and I lose my mind, and I am going to kill, then at the nick of time, I am stopped, to preserve the hero’s moral ground and sanity. Remove all the cheesiness and the predictability, and it is not half bad.

The film is the fourteenth instalment in the DC universe, and it is about the comic book character Blue Beetle, Jamie Reyes. The film explores how Reyes got the Scarab, and they infused into one, and how he managed to have better control over it.

Reyes is a law graduate who came back home from school only to be faced with sad news about their family about to lose their home and his father having had a heart complication.

A fresh graduate, not having a job waiting, got a job cleaning in the mansion of Victoria Kord. Victoria is the sister of Ted Kord and his hellbent on finding a way to use the Scarab, which her brother left behind when he died.

Her niece Jenny who comes to light of this tries to stop her aunt. She steals the Scarab and so that she does not get caught gives it to Jamie. Both had met at Victoria’s mansion the day before, when Jamie stood up for her before her aunt and got fired.

Jamie takes the Scarab home and, upon pressure from his family, opens the box it is contained in, and the Scarab chooses him to bond with.

Victoria has been wanting to see the Scarab bond with someone, so she can extract information about how to make more from it, upon finding out that the stolen Scarab had bonded with Jamie, she sent all her arsenal to go retrieve it.

This film is not a box office hit, and it will not sneak into one, the SAG-AFTRA strike could have been a cause, but I do not think so. The DC train of movies are never a hit and I think this film fell into that trend, even though it is better than some of the movies in the DC universe of films.

So, seeing this film was not a bad viewing experience, but I felt the film would have been a step better than it is if some of the cheesiness were removed.