My Review of "Blue Beetle"

Blue Beetle is DC's latest super-hero movie to come out in 2023. Their last few movies have had their ups and downs. For the most part they haven't been doing that great but I'm a sucker for these movies. I always have some hope that they'll surprise me. It's like drugs. I'm chasing the dragon to get that next high from an actual good super-hero movie.

This movie starts out with the introduction to the Reyes family. Jaime has recently come back to home from college. He's the first one of his family to ever graduate from college. Things are looking up for him but when he finally arrives home he's in for a rude awakening.

All isn't good. His family has been keeping things quiet so that he could concentrate on his studies and succeed. This is very familiar with many immigrant families. That's one of the common things about this movie. It comes from an immigrant family perspective and it's quite relatable. Although I'm not Latino, I could see my family doing many of the things that the Reyes did in this movie.

Jaime finds out that his father has had a stroke while he was gone and the family is in dire financial crisis. All he wants to do is help his family get out of this rut and you can feel how close everyone is with one another in this household.

Meanwhile, there are family issues happening a big company called Kord. This is the same company that is trying to evict the Reyes from their homes. The head of the company, Victoria, is going into a new direction. She wants to build Kord back into the weapons giant that it once was. Her next of kin is her niece Jenny. She is adamant in stopping Victoria.

That's going to be tough because Victoria has finally found the last piece to the company's best weapon tech, the scarab. With this extra-terrestrial artifact Victoria and Kord will become the world biggest weapons supplier. The problem is that she doesn't know how to start up the scarab.

Victoria somehow infiltrates security and steals the scarab. In an act of desperation she hands Jaime the scarab and eventually the scarab merges with Jaime.

The majority of the movie then becomes a game of cat and mouse where Victoria and her henchmen search high and low for Jaime and the scarab. It's standard cut and paste super-hero story from there on.

What makes this stand out is the emphasis on the Reyes family. They continue to build their relationship with one another and in a seamless manner. It's done so well that this movie can get quite emotional when things get really deep in chaos. The stakes feel higher as we feel more of a vested interest in the characters. At times my mind stopped thinking too much of the absurdity of certain scenes because I loved the characters so much.

This movie does have a lot of CGI in it but luckily they aren't as bad as the one in the Flash. There are some scenarios that were pretty bad but for the most part they were done quite well and seamlessly. You still do have a little cartoon feel in there at moments but it isn't too often.

The sound effects are quite good in this one. There's a lot of things flying around from the side and all above you. It's quite immersive and very fun to experience. Unless you have a great sound system this is probably best experienced in a theatre.

Overall, this movie was very smart in focusing on the family aspect of this movie to set itself apart from the rest of the cookie cutter super-hero movies out there. Though if you're already burnt out from super-hero movies then this movie isn't going to change your opinion because they don't really do anything new here. I just felt that they really paced out and developed the characters and their relationships so well that I cared for the characters. For this I have to score this one a 6.5 out of 10. It's fun enough to enjoy in the theatres.