‘Blue Beetle’ Review: DC’s Latest Is Full Of Heart But Not Much Else

Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures © 2023 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

There comes a time when after so many reboots, remakes, and leadership changes that one has to wonder if it’s even worth seeing DC movies until a more definitive announcement is made in regards to which will affect the ones that come after them. Did The Flash reset the DCEU? If it did, the universe that Barry landed in at the end certainly isn’t James Gunn’s DC Universe. While it isn’t crystal clear, it seems that Blue Beetle is (unofficially) the first film in Gunn’s universe, with terms and references specifically indirect enough to make this theory plausible.

Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures © 2023 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Picture this; you graduate college — the first in your family to do so — and return home to find out that not only did your family lose their automobile business, the rent is tripling, but your dad also had a heart attack. For Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña of Cobra Kai), this unfortunate chain of events is life. (Un)fortunately for Jaime, he lands and then loses a job as a cleaner for Victoria Kord (played by Susan Sarandon, who might give a career-worst performance. We’ll get to that later.), finding himself — by luck — acquainted with Victoria’s niece (for the comic fans, daughter of former Blue Beetle Ted Kord) Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine). In an even bigger spree of luck, Jaime finds himself in possession of a… Cheeseburger? A cheeseburger box that he’s been told not to open in any capacity. Like any good movie protagonist, however, he opens it, finding the Scarab, an ancient, powerful piece of technology that bonds with him, turning him into the titular hero.

From the opening minutes, it’s clear that the writing in Blue Beetle is simply awful. The stale dialogue is almost entirely exposition, only exists to clue viewers into exactly what’s happening at all times, as if they’re incapable of understanding subtext, needing to be spoonfed everything the movie wants them to understand. The story, though, is fine. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it is carried out with enough charm to entertain an audience for just over two hours. Tonally and thematically, the film is riddled with cliché, coming across as what could end up being DC’s Spider-Man. There are a number of moments that — regardless of the less-than-perfect VFX — make you go, “Really? Are they doing this? Of course, they’re doing this.”

Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures © 2023 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

The cast, however, is one of the film’s few high points. Led by the ever-charismatic Xolo Maridueña, the Reyes family is clearly full of love, even if that love is used for some of the film’s worst — okay, maybe not the worst, but certainly the cringiest — lines. While Blue Beetle isn’t trying to redefine the superhero movie genre in any way, it is trying to do more than most CGI-heavy comic book flicks. It aims for a higher level of emotion than in most of DC’s films in a strangely similar way to The Flash, marking a new trend in these movies.

While Blue Beetle wants to make us feel things, it rarely can. The “textbook emotional climaxes” come off as artificial, feelings slightly out of place as if a studio head saw an early cut and said, “It’s good. Where are the people going to cry?” The only actual moment that brings any form of reaction comes before this climax, not only because it feels less fake but is actually set up in the story, making sense as to why it’s there.

Blue Beetle is, if anything, a movie you’ve seen many times before. It attempts to extract the best parts of past films to find the winning formula for a home run but ends up hitting a ground-rule double. Had the bar for DC’s films not been so low (looking at you, Black Adam and Shazam: Fury of the Gods), Blue Beetle likely wouldn’t have been anything more than an entry on the “DC movies that probably won’t get touched again” list. Hopefully, with more focus and time to work out a good story (and, for the love of God, good antagonists), another Blue Beetle entry will be something more than DC’s attempt at making Spider-Man.