Blue Beetle review: reluctant bug-shaped superhero finds his calling in solid DC Comics film
- This is the first feature film about Jaime Reyes, who transforms into the Blue Beetle, and becomes the target of the Kord Industries, the company developing an army of weaponised humanoid
- Xolo Maridueña plays the lead role in DC’s first adaptation of a comic led by a Latino superhero
Jaime Reyes, a college graduate, becomes a host to the Scarab, an ancient alien relic, that grants him a powerful exoskeleton armor, turning him into the superhero Blue Beetle. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures/TNSBlue Beetle works, basically, and that puts it ahead of the game for most DC Comics-derived films. Its scale is more human than corporate. And it is really nice to get out of Gotham and visit a new fictional urban centre: Palmera City, imagined here as Miami with a hint of Blade Runner, if Blade Runner enjoyed a little sunshine.
The Blue Beetle character has been around since before World War II, in comics, as a radio serial, on TV and in different iterations. This is the first feature film on the subject, about the teenager Jaime Reyes – just graduated from Gotham U, prelaw, dim prospects – who gets a faceful and then a full-body invasion of alien biotechnology.
This transforms him into the Blue Beetle, which means he becomes the target of the nefarious Kord Industries, the company developing an army of weaponised humanoid “security forces”, aka Robocops but worse.
That part of Blue Beetle may be narratively necessary, but I do not care about that part. What works for me is the material devoted to a specific Mexican-American family (Jaime’s), living in the Edge Keys neighbourhood of Palmera City. The Reyes’ neighbourhood is gentrifying, fast, with rents tripling all over.
We are a long way from the vaguely inhuman wealth of your Bruce Waynes and your Tony Starks, though of course audiences love imagining having all the toys and destruction that go with it. The scarcity of money in Blue Beetle’s working-class realm does not sneak up on you; it is a fact of life, every minute.
Money may not be everything, but as that dancing superhero Gene Kelly said in “An American in Paris,” when you don’t have money, “it takes on a curious significance.”
Gran Turismo has thrilling racing scenes, lacks compelling storyline
The best superhero films, either DC or Marvel, always have a foot in the pressures and terrors of the real world, and not simply in daydreams of terrorist slaughter. In Blue Beetle, Jaime (played by Xolo Maridueña) has saddled his family with college debts.
For reasons the movie relies shamelessly on coincidence to establish, Jaime visits Kord headquarters to meet with Jenny Kord, the one truehearted member of the Kord empire. She is played by Bruna Marquezine, who buoys the spirit of the film.
Jaime is there to discuss a job but ends up with the alien being known as the Scarab inside his body, free of charge. In his Blue Beetle suit of armour, Jaime can fly and customise any sort of weaponry he likes with the help of Khaji-Da, his own his personal Siri-type voice-over coach.
Director Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Miss Bala) set up periodic smackdowns between B.B. and the similarly powerful Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), a Kord Industries prototype of mass destruction. Susan Sarandon’s snivelling CEO pulls the strings and drops in and out of the plot as needed, muttering threats and ordering attacks on Jaime’s family.
She is strictly stock material, but Blue Beetle is largely successful in making Carapax more than a bunch of mean hardware. Also, the Reyes family really does feel like a family. They’re all good screen company: Elpidia Carrillo and Damián Alcázar portray Jaime’s parents, with the serenely majestic Adriana Barraza as his grandmother (with a helpful guerilla fighter past).
Belisso Escobedo delights as his sharp-witted sister and George Lopez, sporting a beard that appears to have set him free as a performer, plays resourceful if paranoid Uncle Rudy, screaming for the downfall of all the colonialist imperialist forces at work in Palmera City.
Is the movie overtly political? Yes, and often wittily; Lopez has a line about what a fascist Batman can be (though he is unseen here), and every verbal and visual detail regarding socioeconomic divides, or micro- and macro-aggressive racism, is there on purpose. Virtually none of that stuff’s in the trailers, of course.
While Blue Beetle isn’t the same representation achievement the first Black Panther was for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movie works on a canvas broad enough to include some wrenching emotional sequences along with the usual superhero selling points. By that I mean: blue bolts of electricity and semi-endless combat.
Ten or 11 superhero films ago, I think I hit my limit on that front. But at least Blue Beetle imagines a world, very much like our own, to go with it.