Blue Beetle is another mediocre movie in a long line of mediocre movies featuring DC superhero characters. It seems that most DC movies fall into either the absolutely dreadful category or the mediocre but watchable category. Blue Beetle wasn’t terrible and was somewhat entertaining but definitely not good. After just watching The Flash a couple of days ago, it is clearly better than that trainwreck of a movie. On the good side, the action and fighting were good. I thought the movie was well cast, in particular Xolo Mariduena as the Blue Beetle and George Lopez as his uncle.
On the bad side, the desperate quest for laughs was often ridiculous and over the top, in particular the Grandmother character was absurd and not remotely funny as the movie intended her to be. The storytelling was weak. The biggest example of this was through dialogue, they kept hammering onto the audience the message that the Reyes family (standing in place of Mexican immigrants in general) love each other and are resilient to adversity. This is a fine message and I have no problem with it, but trust your audience that through the action and dialogue that they will be able to pick up this message. Instead, they treat their audience like idiots who are incapable of understanding a message unless they are repeatedly spoon fed this message. Or in other words, show don’t tell. Suspension of disbelief was stretched to ridiculous levels. As I said, this movie wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good either.
