Blue Beetle Review | An Unremarkable and Generic Mashup of Superhero Traits

Blue Beetle, the new DCEU film starring Xolo Maridueña as the title character, feels like a pretty generic mashup of all the superhero traits. In fact, you can practically see many scenes or scripting tropes that are similar to many movies from DCEU and MCU. With nothing genuinely creating excitement about the concept, Jaime’s Nana using the Barbie version of the M134 Minigun was not enough to make Blue Beetle fun.

So our story is set in Palmera City in Texas. Our hero Jaime Reyes has returned home after graduation only to find that his immigrant family is in a terrible financial situation, and he badly needs a job. The job-seeking eventually takes him to the city’s most prominent industrialist, Kord Industries, where the youngest Kord, Jenny, asks him to keep a package safe with him. Well, the curious Mexican family couldn’t follow the order, and long story short, the artifact known as Scarab that was inside the box is now inside our hero. How the life of this college graduate changes drastically when he gets quick access to a superior Iron Man tech is what we see in Blue Beetle.

The fundamental issue I felt was the guessable nature of almost every beat in the movie. You can argue that origin stories tend to have many cliched elements, as the film’s purpose is to establish the setting. But even for a generic origin story like Shang Chi, at least the humor looked original and sort of gave the template an entertaining outlook. With Blue Beetle, everything feels very familiar, and you kind of know who will die and what will play as an emotional trigger, etc. The fact that we have a superhero of Mexican origin in the superhero universe is somewhat exciting. But in terms of writing, Blue Beetle is no Black Panther to become that kind of a phenomenon.

Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle is fun to watch, and he carries that Peter Parker-like naivety in how the character deals with the superpowers. Bruna Marquezine, as Jenny, was pleasing in her character. Adriana Barraza as the Nana, George Lopez as Uncle Rudy, and Belissa Escobedo as Jaime’s sister Milagro are mostly handling the humor track of the movie. Academy award winner Susan Sarandon plays the role of the antagonist Victoria Kord, and it is your typical superhero villain with greed and obsession towards power.

Ángel Manuel Soto is not getting much help from the written content as most of the elements in the story have visually familiar beats. Khaji Da and the whole suite will remind you of Iron Man, the sequences that show us the fun side of the hero experiencing his powers look familiar. The bus-splitting scene, which is there in the trailer, reminded me of Shang Chi. Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer’s writing isn’t trying anything remarkably new to make this character and his hurdles look exciting for the viewer. It’s just routine stuff that we are ever familiar with. Even the setpieces look pretty flat.

Blue Beetle is a mixture of all the superhero tropes but sadly presented in a pretty unexciting package. The flashy elements and the quick pace might not make it an incredibly dull watch. But it is one of those instantly forgettable movies that doesn’t have any scene or moment we would want to discuss or go back to appreciate.