Blue Beetle
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Blue Beetle (2023)
3 / 5
The comic book movie form is getting tired, and it’s getting harder and harder to find a new angle to make the next costumed hero show fresh and new. Blue Beetle does it by threading family into the plot, from several angles (the hero’s family, the villain’s family, the villain’s henchman’s family … ). This angle, to be fair, is what’s making the Shazam! movies sing, and if comic book movies are good at anything, it’s cribbing from each other. So Blue Beetle presents plucky Jamie Reyes, first in his family to go to college (Gotham Law, no less) who returns after graduation to his family home only to learn that his father is going to lose the family auto-repair shop because of “the corporations.” As part of dutifully attempting to find a job to help his struggling family, Jamie accidentally ends up in possession of “the scarab” (thanks to drama in the villain’s family) which turns out to be an alien symbiote that “chooses” him as a host, and can both heal damage to his body and morph an endless array of power-suit fighty bits into existence.
The movie is set in the vaguely Gulf Coast-ish fictitious Edge Keys, a barrio neighborhood abutting fictitious Palmera City. Kudos to the DC people for keeping the locations fictionalized (most of the DC universe has relied on that from the start), as it allows the film to work with broader themes instead of getting mired in direct political statements. That’s generally for the best, even though it means the Reyes family’s self-proclaimed “Mexican” heritage gets turned into a broader stand-in for Latino heritage writ large. It’s easy for that to tend toward caricature. See for example Uncle Rudy’s socks-and-shorts wardrobe and blinged-out pickup (20 years ago this would totally have been a Cheech Marin role, though George Lopez is having fun leaning into the stereotype). See also Nana’s mysterious youth spent as a machinegun-toting anti-imperialist guerilla fighter (though that would theoretically mean she was a Marxist partisan, which raises a bunch of questions better left unasked). If you are looking to get offended by “race stuff” you’ll find something here to side-eye. But Blue Beetle ultimately asks the audience to just go with it, and that’s a good idea.
Though to be fair you’re going to have to go with a lot, as this film doesn’t just crib the Shazam! family angle (and color it brown and hang a Virgin Mary portrait in its kitchen). Nearly everything is something you’ve seen before. Blue Beetle borrows pieces from both Iron Man and Green Lantern, but really lives deep in the shadow of the assorted Spider-Man movies. Xolo Maridueña even ugly cries in a manner oddly reminiscent of Tobey Maguire. That means Blue Beetle is derivative, but that does not mean it’s bad; the cast is totally committed, so if you can just go with it it’s a lot of fun. I would go see a Shazam/Blue Beetle team-up movie.
3 stars of 5: I liked it, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking here that would bring me back.