BLUE BEETLE - Mark Reviews Movies

Blue Beetle, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

It may seem unlikely, but when it comes to the history of superheroes in comic books, Blue Beetle is almost as old as Superman. While the Man of Steel has been popular since his inception, though, this other hero hasn't been. Perhaps, that's because of the competition, the way he jumped around different comic houses over the course of several decades, the various identity changes he underwent in that time, or the possibility that Blue Beetle just isn't as interesting as the superheroes who have become household names. Blue Beetle, which arrives at a point when superhero movies seem to be facing a series of crises, makes one think the last option might be the most likely one.

Director Angel Manuel Soto's movie doesn't do much of anything to make one think differently, either. Here, we get yet another superhero origin story, in which our protagonist is fairly ordinary until becoming imbued with some kind of powers, while the rest of the tale is devoted to said hero learning about those powers and finally fighting a foe or two—usually with at least one of them with more or less the same abilities. All of those boxes are checked by Gareth Dunnet-Alococer's screenplay, which seems more eager to make checkmarks of formula than to give this hero something—anything—that sets him apart from the countless superheroes and movies about them that we've been inundated with for a couple decades now.

The first check is our superhero's alternate identity, which comes in the person of Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña). He's the son of Mexican immigrants living in the fictional Palmera City, and after graduating college (the first one in his family to accomplish that), Jaime returns home to discover that his parents, Alberto (Damián Alcázar) and Bianca (Elpidia Carrillo), are struggling financially. With the rent rising too much and too quickly, they, Jaime's younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), and grandmother (played by Adriana Barraza) might lose their house.

With the ordinary part out of the way, the story checks off the next part, which has Jaime unexpectedly receiving superpowers from some supernatural or science-fiction source. In this case, it's an ancient scarab statue or an actual beetle, which has become the obsession of business tycoon Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) for decades.

She finds it, hoping to use its power to vastly improve the function of a high-tech device that can transform a single solider into a one-person army and then some. For those who know the formula of this type of story, this inevitably foreshadows that Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), Victoria's right-hand muscle who has been equipped with a prototype of the device, will become our hero's equal or better for a third-act brawl. The movie is so confined to the expectations and demands of formula, by the way, that the super-powered Carapax's metallic costume is red since, obviously, Blue Beetle is blue.

Anyway, Jaime ends up with scarab through a string of complication and convolutions involving Victoria's niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who doesn't want her aunt to possess that much power and, especially, to use it for such militaristic ends. The beetle implants itself inside Jaime's body, giving him handy armor, wings, long legs, a jetpack, and the ability to form any weapon he could possibly imagine. Because the movie's own imagination is so limited, those weapons are usually blades or some kind of blaster.

The rest of the plot is almost exactly what anyone who has seen a superhero origin story would imagine, too. Jaime/Blue Beetle makes a lot of mistakes while learning the ropes of his new powers, and Victoria and her henchmen keep hunting and confronting him in order to recover the scarab. The whole thing moves toward those climactic fights, in which our hero gets to prove how much he has learned, and the visual effects team gets to distract us with a lot of flashing lights and pulses, even as Soto attempts to distract us from the shortcomings of those effects by setting the battles at night.

If there's anything different in Blue Beetle, it's not in the self-aware sense of humor the movie attempts, because we've seen all of that before, too (The scarab's dead-pan voice, provided by Becky G, is a nice, if underutilized, touch, but George Lopez's Uncle Rudy as comic relief feels like a hat atop an already-significant pile of headwear). Maybe it is in the notion that our hero needs some help from his family, who are quick to accept and support Jaime no matter what. It's a pleasant idea, but it does nothing to divest us of the thought that this superhero doesn't have an identity or personality to call his own.

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