Blue Beetle

Frustratingly, once again for everything DC get right with Blue Beetle, there’s a lot they do wrong.

This constant feeling of ‘one step forward, two steps back’ just shows no sign of abating and the James Gunn relaunch of the new ‘DCU’ just can’t come soon enough.

Will we see Blue Beetle again? Who’s to know but what we have here is a character who deserves a second chance but a film that certainly doesn’t.

The first Hispanic-American superhero and a largely Hispanic-American cast, with story beats centred around family and class divides as well as a thumping soundtrack of Spanish language covers of pop songs and a very eighties-leaning score to match the funky eighties Blue Beetle logo is all great but those representation points count for nothing when the film is such a turgid, wretched, lazy, mimicking CGI mess of an origin story that we’ve seen a million times before.

Why do DC keep getting this so wrong?! They’ve got a great character with an interesting backstory and fully developed family who all get starring moments. You spend each interminably awful and blurry action sequence desperate to get back to the family banter. That is not how an action film should be.

It’s difficult to work within the same field as an all-encompassing juggernaut like Marvel but why oh why did they have to create such an unmemorable looking super suit with so many parallels to its counterparts on the other side of the superhero divide?

Seriously, play a drinking game to all of the comparisons to Marvel and you’ll probably collapse before the credits roll.

It’s wildly frustrating and eye-rollingly predictable. The aforementioned fight sequences are arguably the worst in the entire superhero genre, the CGI is unforgivably shocking (the ‘first person in suit’ shots looking like a PS1 game), the villains lacklustre and the lack of wider acknowledgement of the rest of the universe (a Batman reference and a ‘Gotham Law’ hoodie does not suddenly make this film feel part of a wider whole) are simply inexcusable at this stage of the franchise.

I’m sorry Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes and the Reyes family. You deserve better but DC, once again, have failed you.

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