DC’s Blue Beetle Is Officially ‘Fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes

The fast-approaching DC (Extended) Universe film Blue Beetle is off to a strong start on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

At the time of writing, Blue Beetle holds a solid “Fresh” approval rating of 82 percent based on 77 professional reviews. The critics’ consensus reads as follows: “Led by Xolo Maridue?a‘s magnetic performance in the title role, Blue Beetle is a refreshingly family-focused superhero movie with plenty of humor and heart.”

What are critics saying about Blue Beetle?

“Blue Beetle is an entertaining, buoyant, hilarious nugget of a film that will make you feel deeply, and might even make you think deeply, if you let it,” Teresa Jusino of The Mary Sue wrote. Meanwhile, Laura Sirikul of The Nerds of Color posited that “Blue Beetle is a fun and action-packed film filled with heartwarming moments, especially with the Reyes family, which is the film’s greatest strength. Though Blue Beetle succeeds in its heroes, it fails its villains by the one-dimensional Victoria Kord.”

“It’s refreshing to see a DC movie with smaller stakes — the larger world won’t care if a ruthless industrialist gets her magic alien bug back from a poor local family, but the Reyes family very much does,” SuperHeroHype’s own Luke Y. Thompson wrote in his official review of the film. “Like Shazam, Blue Beetle leans heavily on the joys and difficulties of having a large family, but after drawing down the viewer’s defenses with humor, does go to darker places.”

DC’s Jaime Reyes hits the big time

ángel Manuel Soto directed Blue Beetle from a screenplay by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. The film stars the aforementioned Maridue?a as Jaime Reyes, the third comic book hero to assume the eponymous superhero mantle.

“Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it,” the official synopsis reads. “As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero BLUE BEETLE.”

Blue Beetle opens in theaters this Friday, August 18.