I've watched
Blue Beetle. It's decent. Xolo Maridueña is charismatic and likable as Jaime, and his family are endearing - there's a dumb running gag about his grandmother that gets old very fast in the latter half of the movie, but that's my only complaint there. The action scenes are nice and creative, as they should be for a capeshitter like this. I really like the setting, which does what so many previous DC movies refused to do and takes advantage of the fact that this is an entirely fictional city to give it a unique sense of character. Palmera City is bright, glittering, and enticing, a seemingly idyllic paradise for the wealthy and well-connected...and an unattainable dream for impoverished families like the Reyes, who live in a humble working-class neighborhood on the city's outskirts and are treated with disdain by its more fortunate residents. And on a related note, there's some very nice and topical social commentary about what living in America means for a Hispanic family nowadays, and the male members of the family promote a wholesome and non-toxic sense of masculinity, which I don't think we see a lot of in pop culture nowadays.
There are, unfortunately, some downsides to the movie. Susan Sarandon as the main villain gives a very weird, very campy, almost deliberately unnaturalistic performance. I don't know what the idea behind it was, but it doesn't work well. Bruna Marquezine isn't a bad actress, but she's miscast as Jaime's love interest, a character who's supposed to be a privileged, wealthy socialite whose compassion stands in contrast to her aunt's callousness, and yet is initially received with hostility by the Reyes family because of her elite status. Marquezine's ethnicity and very strong Brazilian accent work against these dynamics. I'm not saying there aren't any rich Brazilians; only that in this movie, in this setting, I really think they would have been better off casting a white or white-passing American actress. It's not like this movie is suffering from a lack of diversity. Oh, and it really drives me nuts how while Jaime explicitly makes a point of never killing anyone, his family and love interest in the final act kill lots and lots of people. Very directly killing people, too, as in by pointing guns at them and shooting them dead. It really undermines the strength of whatever no-killing moral they were trying to go for.
The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that it all feels a bit too generic and familiar. We've met all these characters before, seen these tropes before, heard this dialogue before, and so on. It's hard to give specific examples of this - the two I could most easily point to are that the working-class family dynamic feels like it's already been covered by the
Shazam! movies, and the idea of Jaime inheriting a legacy from an older, tech-savvy hero who bolsters him with his technology feels like it comes from the MCU spoder. It's just a general feeling I get that so much of this movie is running over tired, well-worn ground. Is it fair to judge a movie based on what other movies have done before? Well, to a degree, yes. Given the current glut of capeshit, movies have to work harder to stand out from the crowd now. This lack of originality may be a big part of why so many capeshit movies are flopping at the box office when ten years or so ago most of them did very well.
Oh, and this is a minor point, but I don't care for this movie's in-name-only adaptation of OMAC. It reminds me of the in-name-only version of "Intergang" from
Black Adam. I would really rather that movies not bother using the names of characters and organizations from the source material if they bear no actual resemblance to the source material. No adaptation is better than an in-name-only adaptation.
Also, we finally have a trailer for the last DCEU film until Gunn's Superman movie:
Right off the bat, this trailer hits us with a voiceover warning us of what I can already guarantee will be a major flaw in the movie, just like it was in the previous one - Momoa's sheer inability to move out of his comfort zone of playing a chill dudebro. Maybe the people I've argued with about this before have a point in that I shouldn't say he "plays himself," but if it simplifies things, I'll just say that Momoa apparently can't do drama. He can deliver a joke, he can handle an action scene, and he can be a very likable and charismatic screen presence, but he can't effectively portray a lead character that goes through the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of a conventional movie and emerges from the end of it as a different person. Changing his tone of voice from line to line in this voiceover is the least he could do, the very least, and he doesn't do it. Maybe he can't do it, or maybe he refuses to do it because he thinks it'll hurt his brand, like how Dwayne Johnson refuses to ever lose a fight in a movie because he thinks it would hurt his brand. No ill will towards Momoa; I'm sure he's a great guy in real life, but I've grown tired of his stock "chillax, bro, let's get wasted tonight!" performance.
The rest of the trailer looks okay for the most part. It's probably a good idea to keep building on the characters from the first movie rather than introducing a bunch of new ones. Check out how they're basically pretending Amber Heard isn't even in this movie - and compare it to how everyone at the studio fell over themselves going to bat for Ezra Miller after their spree of violent crimes. Hmm. The CGI unfortunately looks poor once again, although nothing jumps out as being as terrible as it was in
The Flash. I guess there's nothing we can do about that as long as Marvel continues to overwhelm the VFX industry and work them ragged with their current oversaturation of content. Finally, check out another article basically predicting that this is going to be a disaster:
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/aquaman-2-jason-momoa-drunk-claims-amber-heard-cut-scenes-elon-musk-letter-1235747775/
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