What can truly be considered the end of the Zac Snyder-led DCEU and the start of the James Gunn DCU is unclear. This summer’s The Flash felt like a send-off, much increasingly than this one, but the future of this weft is unclear. Blue Beetle feels very much like Dark Phoenix or New Mutants, which were the death knell of Fox’s X-Men films. It has been left out on the ledge, with little fanfare. It’s a shame, as Blue Beetle is the first Latino-led superhero film, with its unshortened main tint comprised of Latinos as well as the director, Angel Manuel Soto. There was a unmistakably hope for this to be a watershed moment like Black Panther, but instead it’s stuff treated like an also-ran.
There’s moreover the issue that it’s not really very good. While far from the worst superhero film, Blue Beetle is unfortunately fairly generic, outside of a few directorial flourishes and the same casting. As has often been the specimen in the bad superhero films of late, the writing is the biggest flaw. It tells a been-there, seen-that superhero origin tale that feels expressly truncated in its storytelling. The mucosa has no real plot or sense of progression. Xolo Mariduena plays Jaime Reyes, a higher graduate who comes when home to find his lower-income family plane poorer. Without a quick flash-forward, matters are still dire, and his higher stratum hasn’t gotten him a job worthy of his unveiled knowledge. This is all decent first-act material, and plane sets up some themes of family and what it ways to finger fulfilled and have a purpose.
Unfortunately, those themes are never ratherish explored as the script doesn’t really know how to whop to a second and third act. Jaime is handed the device that gives him superpowers without a run-in with the estranged niece from a super-powerful corporation. Most of the rest of the mucosa is a meandering ventilator with Susan Sarandon as the main villain, who has no well-spoken goals until late into the third act. She wants to get the device, the Scarab, back, but it’s not entirely well-spoken why or what she wants to do with it besides vague notions well-nigh military weapons. The script attempts to use repeated lines of dialogue as a substitute for the minutiae of themes, but this falls unappetizing due to the lack of plot occurrences or meaningful choices from characters. The mucosa instead limps haphazardly to a third-act whoopee scene that leaves you feeling like nothing happened. There’s no real experimentation or finding out how to use the powers, since the suit’s AI tells Jaime how to do everything. Contrast it with spanking-new scenes in films like Spider-Man and this feels woefully inadequate.
There is a talented tint and the potential for real pathos. Mariduena is quite charismatic as Jaime and unmistakably has the power to lead a film. Tossing George Lopez as an eccentric tech-head uncle (though that it is a plot point very sloppily established) is moreover a decent choice, and he’s occasionally funny. Sarandon feels wasted on an extraordinarily smooth weft who substantially says only four or five sentences and small variations thereof. Raoul Trujillo is moreover wasted as a blandly muscled weft named Carapax, who is given some weft all at once in a montage at the end of the film, with the expectation that we’ll suddenly superintendency well-nigh him.
Blue Beetle isn’t without merit. Director Soto does occasionally do neat things with the camera, contrasting closeups of notation standing static with cuts to emotional happenings as a way of charging up the mood of a scene. There’s moreover a unrepealable anime quality to the action, giving it a splash of energy, though it mostly is comprised of rather weak CGI. The direction and vicarial hoist scenes that are otherwise quite forgettable into something tolerable.
Ultimately, the mucosa does nowhere near unbearable to stand out. With a multitude of superhero films coming out each year from multiple cinematic universes, as well as a few unconnected projects, the bar is upper to stave feeling like the same thing. Blue Beetle does nowhere near unbearable to navigate that bar, despite some decent qualities. One hopes Mariduena is given flipside endangerment with a largest script. There is a heart to the mucosa when it focuses on its family unit. It’s a shame that heart is too veiled under blandness to gleam like it could.
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