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.
Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña), the first in his family to graduate from college, returns home to discover that his relatives have been shielding their bright, promising spark from a few dispiriting truths: his father, Alberto (Damián Alcázar), has lost his store after a heart attack; the all-mighty Kord corporation, run by Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Kord, is eating into the Mexican neighbourhoods where they live in the fictional Texan city of Palmera – and the Reyes house is next in its sights.
Blue Beetle certainly isn’t apolitical – when Jaime arrives at the airport, a billboard behind him proudly proclaims that Palmera City has the “#1 lowest tax rate for corporations in America” – but Soto’s film is hardly as biting as its initial premise suggests. This is especially the case once Jaime gets his hands on Kord’s secret weapon: an intergalactic, AI-powered scarab that latches onto its host not unlike Marvel’s Venom symbiote (the film itself borrows the term, so it’s not exactly resisting the comparison). The alien relic lends Jaime some impenetrable, bug-like armour and any weapon his imagination can conjure. That his first thought is a massive, wildly impractical anime sword probably says a lot about him.
There are references to anti-Communist military operations in Guatemala, a RoboCop-style private police force, and the white, capitalist feminism of Sarandon’s villain, who is accurately described by Jaime’s sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as “sexy, in a Cruella, Kardashian way”. But the film is burdened by its adherence to certain comic book conventions and the introduction of a love interest in the form of Victoria’s blandly characterised niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine) who we are told is actually a nice billionaire who pinky-promises not to exploit anybody ever. In the end, our hero in the big, robot suit has to fight the villain in the other big, robot suit (Victoria’s bodyguard, Raoul Max Trujillo). Things play out exactly as you expect them to.
Yet, Jaime himself is a charmer, and Maridueña manages to syphon a little of the panicked sincerity of Spider-Man’s past into a “new hero on the block” character that feels entirely his own. His family, too – which also includes Jaime’s mother (Elpidia Carrillo), his uncle (George Lopez), and his grandmother (Adriana Barraza) – become crucial to the story, allowing Blue Beetle to function both as solo adventure and an ensemble fare. They are jubilant and chaotic in ways that only tight-knit, intergenerational family units can be.
Blue Beetle is broad and endearingly kid-friendly in its humour (one of the weapons is called the “bug fart”). It is also precise in its homages to Mexican culture, including a nod to the popular superhero parody El Chapulín Colorado. Soto, who’d previously directed the acclaimed 2020 drama Charm City Kings, starring Meek Mill, mostly colours within the lines, but there are a few welcome flourishes. A night-time action sequence, for example, is explicitly shot to mirror the spiteful inhumanity of ICE raids on undocumented immigrant families. Blue Beetle, in the end, isn’t quite bold enough to overcome its somewhat clunky catchphrase “Family, that’s what makes me strong”, but at the very least, you can believe those words came from the heart.
Dir: Ángel Manuel Soto. Starring: Xolo Maridueña, Adriana Barraza, Damián Alcázar, Raoul Max Trujillo, Susan Sarandon, George Lopez. 12A, 127 minutes.
‘Blue Beetle’ is in UK cinemas on 18 August
