Movie Review: Blue Beetle

I feel bad for "Blue Beetle." I really do. It was finished before the massive shakeup that brought James Gunn and Peter Safran in as heads of DC movies. It was made before Gunn announced that they would start fresh with their movies and not build off any of the movies made in the last ten years. I feel bad because I had a very good time with this movie.

Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) becomes the symbiotic host to an alien scarab. In return, it gives Jamie incredible powers, allowing him to save his family and fight the head of the company who wants to take the scarab powers for herself.

The heart of this movie is Jamie and his family. Jamie is very close to his family, and when he graduates college and sees that his family is struggling, he takes a cleaning job to help make ends meet. When his family is attacked, he uses his new powers to save them. It is rare for a superhero movie to focus so much on the family, and I loved how all the Reyes rallied around Jamie and one another.

For as acclaimed an actress as Susan Sarandon is, I felt she was phoning in her performance as the villain. I don't know if I can blame her because there was nothing on the page for her to work with. Victoria Kord is a one-note villain who is completely uninteresting.

This movie is a lot of fun; that is all I wanted from it. I was not expecting some new ground to be broken in the superhero genre (a more cynical person might call this an "Iron Man" rip-off). All I wanted from this movie was to have fun while watching it, and on that level, it delivered. DC movies have had a very rough time recently. "Black Adam" and "Shazam: Fury of the Gods" were massive bombs. "The Flash" was entertaining but had a lot of baggage attached to it. This is why I was rooting for "Blue Beetle."

7/10

Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, language, and some suggestive references

2hr 7min