Scarabs are Dung Beetles, Right?

I guess Blue Beetle (2023) didn't exactly take the world by storm, and wasn't hated and despised by all. This makes sense. It's a decent, fun, family superhero movie with fw pretensions. Too bad it needed to be a blockbuster.

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Mariduena) is the first of his family to graduate college. His family picks him up at the Panera City airport and lets him know the bad news. They are going to lose the family house in Lost Keys. The Kord family oligarchs are developing the property. So Mariduena's sister, Bellissa Escobedo, gets him a job at a Kord resort. But he overhears Kord CEO Susan Sarandon arguing with her niece and daughter of the founder, and steps in when it looks like it will get physical. So he is fired, but the niece, Bruna Marquezine, tells him to check with her at Kord HQ, and she'll try to get him a job. 

The next day finds her stealing the McGuffin, and passing it off to him so he can get it out of the building. And of course he opens it, and it's the Scarab, a biomechanical whatsit that attaches to your back and gives you scary superpowers. And there you go, that's the setup. The rest of the movie will be Sarandon and henchmen trying to get it back and Mariduena and Marquezine trying to keep it from them. 

In addition, there's some stuff in the title sequence about the original Blue Beetle that we didn't pay attention to. But it turns out that the original was Ted Kord, Marquezine's father, who disappeared but left behind a trove of high-tech weapons. Well, sort of high-tech. Several characters talk about the almost-forgotten BB as being like Flash or Green Lantern, but crappier. One comments on an invention, it's like something Batman would build if he had ADHD. 

If I had to analyze, the problem with this movie is that the symbiont suit (wait, is this movie just Dollar Store Venom?) doesn't get enough attention. But that's also the great thing about the movie - instead, it concentrates on the family. They are a typical Mexican-American family, partly documented, partly not. The mom and dad are loving, sister is sarcastic and cute, grandma is secretly a bad-ass revolutionary ("Abajo los imperialistos!") and the uncle... George Lopez plays the uncle, a conspiracy theorist and hacker. Lots of fun. 

The Hispanicity of the movie is a fun angle, but feels natural (to me, Mr. Whitebread). It's not revolutionary, it's just part of American life. I suppose some people like that, some don't. We did. This wasn't a great movie, but a fun one. Better than Shazam II anyway.