Blue Beetle could have been way better.

I'm definitely more upset at how bad Blue Beetle is than I would be at how bad The Marvels surely is, even though I'm certain the latter is considerably worse.

Blue Beetle has a lot of interesting elements, a decent cast, and a hero with a powerset that is comparatively unique. A little Iron Man, a little Cyborg, a little Night Owl, and a little Green Lantern. There's a lot you can do with that.

And yet halfway into the film, the script is overloaded with clichés and on-the-nose exposition, the villain is utterly cartoonish and paper-thin, the main henchman is just another guy in a suit with similar powers, and the clumsy ham-fisted way they've tried to shoe horn in some deeper "themes" feels like a draft 1 placeholder.

For example, the setup has a lot of moments that are trying to show us how racist everyone at Kord Tech is, including having a secretary first assume Jaime is a delivery boy - even though he's wearing a blazer and a button down shirt and isn't carrying anything that could be delivered - and then when he tells her his name, she calls him "Jay-mee" instead of "Hai-may", but he never spelled his name for her. He just said it outloud and she heard it one second earlier for the first time.

That's dumb enough on the surface, but this film is set in a place called "Palmera City", which looks like an alternate Miami, but which is canonically a border city in Texas. It is clearly majority-Hispanic, so this secretary would have definitely been around Hispanic names her whole life. It's not remotely believable that she thought he'd be a delivery guy, nor that she would mispronounce his name like that.

Another example. The villain talks about creating a new supersoldier suit, literally called "OMAC" or the One Man Army Corps. It's clearly designed for the military... But she calls it "the next development in private policing". That's confused... But it makes sense if you just want to say buzzwords signaling some social criticism to idiots.

But okay, that's superficial stuff.

In the third act, the baddie henchman asks Jaime why he deserves the power of the Scarab.

We've been told repeatedly that the Scarab chooses the host. But instead of spending the first act showing me why Jaime is a wonderful person who deserves to become a superhero, it spent that whole time doing weak social commentary, making bad jokes, and introducing me to deeply unlikable characters like Jaime's sister (who, in addition generally being bitter, seems dedicated to ensuring that she drags Jaime down). We learn that Jaime was the first person in his family to graduate college, but they don't even bother to tell us what his major was.

What does he like to do? No idea.
Does he have hobbies or skills? Not sure.
Is he a really nice person? Maybe?
Does he have a strong sense of morality? There's no evidence of that.
Does he have exceptional courage? No.
Exceptional optimism? Again, no.

This isn't a dig on Xolo Maridueña, who is really charming and quite good in this, but the film could have taken some time to show me who he is and why he might be someone "chosen" by an alien AI superweapon to be its host, and instead it told me that Batman is a fascist and Nana was probably a communist revolutionary who contributed to the downfall of whatever fictional country the family came from.

Would it have been hard to develop Jaime a bit? No. Not at all. The writer (Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, who has done little else of note) just didn't bother.

It's a shame, because this could have been significantly better with a few relatively minor changes, but it just reeks of studio apathy and an inexperienced, mediocre creative team.

And that's why I'm especially irritated by it.

A few script passes by a more competent writer and Blue Beetle would have been an excellent film, even without changing much of anything about the core plot. Nobody cared enough.