Blue Beetle spoiler-free review: “Nothing New But Family”

While no one except James Gunn and Peter Safran know what’s truly going on with the DC universe, Blue Beetle‘s entry gives the fans a brief respite from the storm of reshuffling. Spoiler-free review!

Blue Beetle

Directed by: Ángel Manuel Soto

Starring: Xolo Maridueña, George Lopez, and Susan Sarandon

Runtime: 2 hours, 7 Mins

Synopsis

When newly graduated Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returns to his family home in Palmera City hoping to celebrate his accomplishment, he quickly discovers his family financial situation will push his family out of the city. While attempting to secure a job at Kord corporation, Jaime is accidentally given access to the Scarab, a piece of alien tech that bonds to his body and changes the course of his and his family’s lives forever.

All This Has Happened Before

By this point, if you’ve watched any number of superhero movies, you can figure out the basic plot and structure with your eyes closed. We could point at Beetle and how its emulated some of the following arcs from different superhero movies:

• Focusing on a highly powered suit or armor with an AI sidekick: Iron Man (2008), Spiderman: Homecoming (2017)
• Hero accidentally takes the powers that the villain wanted: Venom (2018), The Mask (1994), The Rocketeer (1991), The Guyver (1991), Shazam! (2019), Ant-Man (2015)
• Greedy industrialist wants a suit for military applications: the entire Iron Man series, Ant-Man, The Guyver, The Rocketeer
• Villain mimicking the exact same powers as our hero: Iron Man, Black Panther (2018), Ant-Man, The Incredible Hulk (2008), too many to list
• Losing a love one that spurs you to fight: also too many to list

This isn’t to say this movie or any future origin-story movies are unoriginal, far from it actually. However, as the superhero genre wears on through the decades, we’ve grown accustomed to certain formulas and themes coming up over and over. While it’s always up to the individual director and creative teams to develop the property, that doesn’t mean that fatigue can’t seep in if studios don’t stay fresh by pushing and allowing their creatives to do something new.

Beetle succeeds by having enough new things to say about its lead character and his family, which we’ll get to below. However it does mean there’s plenty of “by the numbers” sort of scenes that only serve to get the audience from Point A to Point B which fall back into the well worn tropes outlined above.

Avoiding the Freshman CGI curve

Many first-time, big budget directors sometimes have issues developing what their characters are going to look like, or don’t understand how some changes can greatly affect the look of their characters. For example: while Black Panther gets plenty of praise for developing Wakanda in such a way that it impacted audiences everywhere, a common complaint comes in the final battle between Killmonger and T’Challa that looks significantly different or poor compared to everything that came before it.

Beetle avoids this issue for the most part … there were a few issues where the camera framing doesn’t allow you to absorb what’s happening in the scene (almost like they zoomed in because they didn’t trust the choreography) but largely the CGI models work well across a variety of environments, and are mixed well between a variety of practical and special effects that you barely notice the difference, which is exactly what you want to see in a major blockbuster. And given the mixed reception that The Flash (2023) received for it’s visual effects, DC fans can rest easy here.

The Family Dynamic

Where Beetle really shines are in the dynamics between the Reyes family members, which are interspersed well throughout key moments. With the exception of Uncle Rudy (played by George Lopez, who receives a lot of well-deserved screen time) the rest have minimal time with Jaime, but contribute to the overall narrative at the right time. Whether it’s Jaime’s sister Milagro (played by Belissa Escobedo) negging him early on as they try to secure jobs and save the family house, his mother and father’s encouragements near the beginning and ending of the film, or his nana showcasing her revolutionary past as they attack the Kord corporation (in what may be the biggest sequence everyone talks about after the movie), director Ángel Manuel Soto finds a way to have everyone shine without resorting to tired conversational quips that have mired many Marvel productions (and even more) and resulted in bloated casts that feel lifeless and underdeveloped.

The Reyes family perfectly exemplifies a blend of immigrant family themes and, when the movie is working well, it showcases the difficulties their family has faced just to live and exist in fictional Palmera City (which could easily be a stand-in for a futuristic, corporatized version of Miami). So, as much as the family members are there to reflect for Jaime, their story is likely to resonate strongly to any number of Latin American immigrants who have felt the squeeze from a corporation exploiting their labor or been hurt by federal policies that benefit fictional companies like Kord. With Jaime / Beetle as their stand-in, it allows the sort of wish fulfillment that they have been denied for decades to play out on screen – though it remains to be seen if this character will actually upset the established hierarchy going forward that so many heroes inadvertently maintain through their actions.

Nearly Flat Arcs

So many movies in this genre suffer from poor villain motivation and Beetle is no exception. There’s an interesting subplot with Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Kord being passed over for running the Kord corporation which, if fleshed out, could have been a fantastic development or new wrinkle in the greedy arms dealer subgenre. However, the story is content to just let Sarandon chew a bit of scenery and mostly stand there and posture. It’s a shame too because the ending for Carapax (played by Raoul Max Trejillo), one of her henchmen, is expounded on in the final few minutes. Without spoiling how that happens, had Victoria’s ruthlessness as a businesswoman been a bit more elaborated, the impact of this development would hit the emotional notes they were aiming for. Additionally, since Victoria’s actions at Kord directly impacted the Reyes family as well as other lower-income families experiencing gentrification and/or Latin American immigrants facing deportation, they missed an opportunity to really tie together several themes that were alluded to. Instead, audiences will have to do some heavy lifting to make these connections work.

Additionally, while Jaime and his family work well together, what’s less convincing are moments with just Jaime and his AI counterpart, Khaji-Da (voiced by Becky G) interacting. It’s meant to be a key dynamic in the film, however this element of the story simply isn’t given enough time to develop. Worse, you can barely hear what the characters are saying to one another so when the narrative is attempting to be impactful, it’s lost in a sea of noise and generic explosions. For how important Khaji-Da should have been to the narrative, many times it felt like an afterthought and it hurts later on when Jaime and Khaji-Da need to be on the same page to win the day.

Conclusion / Recommendation

Will Blue Beetle wow you compared to the solo entries of so many other superhero movies that we’ve seen before? Probably not. But they do something in one film that 10 Fast and Furious films have tried and come short on: developing a family you care about – that alone is worth the price of admission!

If you’re looking for a fun romp to take the family to see just as school is starting back across the US or have become fatigued from the hype of Barbenheimer, you can’t go wrong checking this out. And you’ll likely be surprised by how well the third acts comes together for the entire Reyes family, even with the generic issues that we discussed above.

Score: 8 out of 10