Blue Beetle is a likeable, if predictable, take on the superhero origin story that at no point invokes time travel, the multiverse, or a ginormous portal in the sky. And thank god for that. The box office failures of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Flash earlier this year have renewed cries of superhero fatigue, but have audiences really moved on from masked heroics, or are we merely worn down by the way studios keep trying to play 3D chess with their own franchises?
When Blue Beetle was first conceived, Warner Bros decided its fate would be a direct-to-streaming release – despite the film’s boundary-breaking representation of Latino talent in front of and behind the cameras. At some point, though, the mood shifted and the vision of its Puerto Rican director, Ángel Manuel Soto, inspired a change of heart within the studio’s executive leadership. Blue Beetle arrives now in cinemas, together with a promise from the newly installed heads of DC, James Gunn and Peter Safran, that the hero will be the first of their so-called, fully revamped “DCU”. Unfortunately, beyond its cultural specificity, the film is not all that remarkable. There is, though, something pleasantly nostalgic about its straightforwardness, a callback to the earlier days of the genre when characters and emotions actually had room to breathe.
