Josh Reviews Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle is the newest DC superhero movie released by Warner Brothers Discovery.  It’s the third of four DC superhero films that were left in limbo following the announcement that James Gunn and Peter Safran would be rebooting the DC film universe, despite these four mostly-finished films having not yet been released.  (The first two were Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash.)  Blue Beetle is a stand-along film introducing a new hero and a new supporting cast.  It’s a film that could easily be folded into James Gunn’s rebooted DC film universe, if they wanted to.  (I suspect that decision will be based on the film’s box office.)

The film opens with Jaime Reyes returning home after graduating college.  Jaime is the son of Mexican immigrants, and he was the first member of his family to have attended college.  But Jaime’s pre-law degree doesn’t wind up being as helpful as he’d expected; his family is about to lose their long-time family house, and the only job Jaime is able to get is working as a housekeeper for the wealthy Victoria Kord.  It’s there that Jaime meets Jenny Kord, whose father Ted Kord used to run the huge company Kord Industries, in addition to (secretly) being the superhero the Blue Beetle.  But Ted vanished years ago, and Kord Industries is now run by the evil Victoria.  Visiting Jenny at the Kord Industries office the next day, Jaime hopes she will give him a job.  But he winds up with more than he expects when he interrupts Jenny mid-heist.  She’s stolen the mysterious scarab that Victoria is using to power her latest technological scheme: OMAC, the One Man Army Corps, that’s basically a way to turn a human soldier into a super-powered weapon of mass destruction.  Jenny gives Jaime the scarab and asks him to hide it — but it turns into a superhero origin story for Jaime, as the scarab bonds with him and he is able to unlock the sentience within it, and soon finds himself encased in a living suit of armor.

I enjoyed Blue Beetle.  At this point, we’ve seen a lot of super-hero origin stories on film, and while there’s nothing too terribly groundbreaking about this story, this is a well-made film that is a lot of fun.

While the film’s story might feel familiar, there IS something groundbreaking about Blue Beetle: its primarily Latino main cast.  It’s exciting to see a Latino super-hero!  The film is filled with Latino faces in front of and behind the camera.  Pretty much every major character in the film, outside of Susan Sarandon’s villainous Victoria Kord, is Latino.  The film was directed by Ángel Manuel Soto, who is Puerto Rican, and it was written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, who was born in Mexico.  There’s a lot of Spanish spoken in the film, which feels right, and the film is filled with what seems to me to be many beautiful touches of Latino authenticity.

What separates the story of Blue Beetle from most other superhero origin stories is the focus on family.  The film does a wonderful job developing every character in Jaime’s immediate family: Damián Alcázar and Elpidia Carrillo as Jaime’s parents Alberto and Rocio; Belissa Escobedo as Jaime’s sister Milagro; George Lopez (who is a lot of fun in the film) as Jaime’s conspiracy-obsessed, tech-minded uncle Rudy; and Adriana Barraza as Jaime’s grandmother.  These actors are all fantastic, creating a tight loving circle around Jaime.  In most super-hero origin stories, the hero gets super-powers and then tries to keep it secret from his family and other loved ones.  There’s none of that here in Blue Beetle, and I thought that was a delightful relief.  Jaime first discovers his super-powers right in the middle of the family kitchen, and there’s not a second of his trying to go it alone.  I love that about the film.  It’s fun to see Jaime’s family as such a strong team, working together to take on the bad guys.  (There’s a great moment at the end when, instead of a kiss with the beautiful Jenny, Jaime moves away from her to give his sister a big hug.  I liked that.)

Xolo Maridueña is strong as Jaime Reyes.  He’s got an affable charisma that makes him a fun lead for this adventure.  It’s always fun to see Susan Sarandon on-screen, here playing the evil Victoria Kord.  I wish her character wasn’t so three-dimensional.  You’ve got Susan Sarandon as your villain!!  I wish they’d given her some more nuanced, juicy scenes to play.  Instead, she’s one-dimensionally evil from the get-go.  (There’s a brief mention of the sexism in her origin story — that she co-founded Kord Industries with Jenny’s grandfather, but when he died, instead of allowing her to run the company, he passed it on to his male son Ted.  It’d have been nice to have dug deeper into that, to have given Victoria more layers.)  Bruna Marquezine is solid as Jenny Kord; at first I thought the character was a little too unbelievably drop-dead beautiful; but this is a movie, after all!  I quickly warmed up to Ms. Marquezine’s performance.

I never thought I’d ever see OMAC on-screen.  It’s cool to see this great DC concept included in this film, though I wish the design of the OMAC tech hewed closer to one of the classic OMAC looks from the comics (the original Jack Kirby design, or the look from the John Byrne miniseries, or the Infinite Crisis robot look — those are all cool designs).  Here Carapax is just in a sort of generic-looking Iron Man suit.  (There’s a lot this film borrows from the Marvel Iron Man movies.  The third-act battle between Jaime as Blue Beetle and the souped-up Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) had the look and feel of an Iron Man battle; Carapax reminded me a lot of Whiplash from Iron Man 2; we get shots of Jaime’s face inside the blue beetle helmet that reminded me of the shots of Tony inside the Iron Man armor; Carapax’s mother was killed by a Kord bomb the way Wanda and Pietro’s family was killed by a Stark bomb, etc. Also, Jaime talked to the Scarab personality in his armor the same way Tony talks to Jarvis and especially the way Peter Parker talks to the A.I. in his Stark-designed armor in Spider-Man: Homecoming.)

Ted Kord is a great character from the comics.  I thought it was an interesting choice to frame him as a legacy character in this film.  Our hero Jaime is the modern version of Blue Beetle, but I liked that Ted was a presence around the edges of the film.  (The mid-credits teaser promises a potential team-up between the two Blue Beetles if they are ever able to make a sequel.  That could be fun.)

The visual and special effects in the film are strong.  I really like the look of the Blue Beetle suit.  I like the way we see his jaw move, bringing life to the character even when his full mask is on.  (That’s always a challenge for super-hero movies in which the hero’s face is fully covered.  I smiled to see Blue Beetle’s face mask half ripped off at the end, so we could see actor Xolo Maridueña’s face.  That reminded me of how Spidey’s face mask always seemed to get ripped during the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies…)  There’s some cool action in the film.  Ioved seeing Ted Kord’s Blue Beetle lair and I adored the Blue Beetle ship, “the Bug”.  It was so fun to see that famous, somewhat silly ship from the comics brought to life on-screen!!  That made me very happy.

This is a mostly fun, happy movie that gets dark in the third act.  For the most part, I thought the tonal shift worked.  The wrenching scene in which Jaime is dragged away while chaos reigns at his family’s home was very emotional to me; more thrilling than I’d expected this movie to get.  On the other hand, as was the case in the previous DC/Warner Brothers movie Shazam!, there were some adult moments woven into the film that I think were a mistake.  I’m thinking of scenes like when people hanging out at the bus stop are joking about when their drugs kicked in; or the joke at the end about blood flooding to Jaime’s genitals, etc.  This really feels like it should be an all-ages film.  I get that the filmmakers want to be cool and to appeal to adults, but I think a good story will appeal to adults!  For the vast majority of Blue Beetle’s run-time, I thought this was a film that would be enjoyed by kids and adults alike; a rare thing in movies these days!!!  So I think the film would have been stronger without those handful of more adult jokes.

I also wish the film took the time to better explain the scarab, the armor, and how it all works.  How much of this is tech and how much is organic?  At one point, Jaime gets his suit’s wings torn off.  I wanted to know whether the suit could regrow them or not.  There’s a lot of talk in the third act about the suits’ power levels.  Jaime gets himself drained of all power, and later Carapax sets his suit to maximum power.  But what does that mean?  Where is the power coming from?  Once Jaime is drained, how is he able to regenerate power?  I also wanted to know more about how exactly Victoria planned to use the Scarab.  Why was the scarab needed to make her OMAC suits work?  Was it just a matter of draining all that blue power?  (That reminded me of the Red Skull draining blue-colored energy from the Cosmic Cube in order to power all of Hydra’s futuristic weaponry in Captain America: The First Avenger.)  Or was it some sort of tech or A.I. from the scarab that she needed?

If this is the only Blue Beetle film, this is a solidly enjoyable stand-alone super-hero adventure.  At the same time, there’s a lot of potential here to explore, if the folks at DC/Warner Brothers decided to continue this as a franchise.  This film isn’t lighting the box office on fire, but none of the recent DC films have done well.  I think this is the fault of the public running out of patience with the DCEU and the earlier bad movies (Batman v. Superman, the whole catastrophe of the dueling visions of a Justice League movie, etc., the disappointing mediocrity of Black Adam) as opposed to being an accurate reflection of these recent films’ quality.  (I loved The Flash, for instance.)  (I seem to be one of the few who did!)  I suspect people will catch up to this film in the coming years.

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