"Is that the new Tamagotchi?" asks Rocio Reyes (Elpidia Carrillo) when her son Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) brings home a burger box containing a glowing metallic insect with fries. Er, no. What Gotham University graduate turned pool cleaner Jaime has actually stumbled upon is an ancient piece of alien biotech that wastes no time transforming him into a flying bug symbiote with scorpion-like antennae protruding from his back. "You’re a superhero, cabrón!" says his uncle Rudy (George Lopez) gleefully. In a world where Supes and Batman have things pretty much in check, though, is there any need for another?
It’s a question that looms large over indie helmer Angel Manuel Soto’s neon-lit postscript to a soon-to-be-revamped DCEU, especially given how alarmingly The Flash crashed and burned this summer. By setting its sights low, though, Blue Beetle nimbly accomplishes more, giving one of DC’s lesser-known crimefighters a sprightly Latin American makeover that, like Black Panther before it, allows a previously neglected demographic to have a champion they can call their own.
The power-bestowing relic comes into Jaime’s possession through heiress Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), a missing philanthropist’s daughter who is less than thrilled by the army of ultra-soldiers her nasty aunt Victoria (Susan Sarandon) intends to create using the Khaji Da scarab’s arsenal of abilities. Jaime spends much of the film working out what those abilities are in what very much resembles a world-establishing curtain-raiser for more ambitious future instalments. Yet it is one that permits his nearest and dearest to get in on the action, among them an elderly Nana (Adriana Barraza) who knows how to operate an energy bolt-firing mini-cannon when called upon to do so.
Whether those future adventures materialise or not may be out of Soto’s hands. Should the Blue Beetle experiment soar no further, though, it will do so having sent a breath of fresh air and exuberance through the DC corridors, its playfulness best exemplified towards the end of the film by an outrageous visual gag referencing Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. While bemoaning how tough life has become in the made-up Palmera City, Jaime’s sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) remarks that "progress is not for us!" In a genre increasingly subsumed by numbing bombast, Blue Beetle’s abundance of personality might just be progress enough.
Blue Beetle is in UK and US cinemas on August 18.
