Director – Angel Manuel Soto, Screenplay – Gareth Dunnett-Alcocer, Producers – Zev Foreman & John Rickard, Photography – Pawel Pogorzelski, Music – Bobby Krlic, Visual Effects Supervisor – Kelvin McIlwrain, Visual Effects – Digital Domain 3.0 (Supervisor – Jay Barton), Rise Visual Effects Studios & Rodeo VFX Inc., Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Hawker, Makeup Effects Designer – Bill Johnson, Production Design – Jon Billington. Production Company – Safran Company.
Cast
Xolo Maridueña (Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle), Bruna Marquezine (Jenny Kord), George Lopez (Rudy Reyes), Damian Alcazar (Alberto Reyes), Elpidia Carillo (Rocio Reyes), Belissa Escobedo (Milagro Reyes), Adriana Barraza (Nana Reyes), Susan Sarandon (Victoria Kord), Raoul Max Trujillo (Lieutenant Ignacio Carapax), Becky G (Voice of Khaji-Da), Harvey Guillen (Dr Sanchez)
Plot
Jaime Reyes returns to Palmero City from university only to find that the family home in the Edge Keys neighbourhood has been scheduled for demolition by the Kord Corporation. Jamie and his sister Milagro are forced to take jobs as servants for Victoria Kord but are fired when Jaime steps up to intervene in an argument between Victoria and her niece Jenny. Afterwards, Jenny tells Jaime she will get him a job at Kord Corporation. As Jaime arrives, Jenny has just stolen a scarab artifact being studied in the labs and gives it to Jaime for safekeeping. He is prompted to look in the box whereupon he is immediately taken over by the scarab, an artificial intelligence of alien origin called Khaji-Da that starts to fuse with his body to create a skeletal armour and provide incredible powers. In trying to get rid of the Blue Beetle armour, Jaime and Jenny are hunted by Victoria who wants to obtain the secrets of the armour to power her own super-soldier O.M.A.C (One Man Army Corps).
Blue Beetle is a Superhero Film from DC Comics. It is probably the last gasp of the so-called Snyder-verse DCEU that began with Man of Steel (2013) and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), before the Snyder-verse is to be superseded by the Gunn-verse. That said, Blue Beetle was not a character that emerged from the Snyderverse but more one of the outliers and oddities that DC produced during this period such as Joker (2019), The Batman (2022), Black Adam (2022) and the cancelled Batgirl film, in the hope of throwing anything at a wall just to see what might stick.
There are several different superheroes with the name Blue Beetle on the comic-book page. The first Blue Beetle made their appearing in Mystery Comics #1 from Fox Comics in 1939, coming out not long after Superman first hit the comic-book page. This was police officer Dan Garrett who took Vitamin 2X, which granted superpowers, and placed on a blue costume to fight crime. This was published up until 1950 when Fox Comics went bankrupt. The title was purchased by Charlton Comics who created a different incarnation of Garrett as an archaeologist who gains his powers after finding a scarab. Garrett was succeeded by Ted Kord, an inventor who took over the costume and designed an arsenal of gadgets. Charlton was absorbed by DC in 1983 who began a series of adventures with Ted Kord as the Beetle where he was given his own series in 1986 and was inducted into the Justice League before being killed off in 2005. In 2006, DC introduced a new Blue Beetle, who was made into Jaime Reyes, a Mexican-American teenager living in El Paso in an effort to expand diversity in comics. The scarab was retconned to become a piece of alien tech, which provided armour and a set of insect-like arms. Jaime became a member of the Teen Titans in 2007.
Blue Beetle has appeared on film before in the animated Justice League vs Teen Titans (2016) and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (2017). On tv, Blue Beetle appeared in live-action in an episode of Smallville (2001-10) where he was played by Jaren Brandt Bartlett, as well featured as a regular on the animated Young Justice (2010-22) from its second season. Surprisingly, Blue Beetle does not feature in the popular animated tv series Teen Titans (2003-6) and Teen Titans Go! (2013– ), or the live-action Titans (2018-23).
Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes
It is a misnomer to make the claim that Jaime Reyes is the first Latino superhero. Everybody seems to be forgetting Mexico’s own wrestling superhero El Santo who appeared in 52 films between 1958 and 1982 in which he fought alien invaders and assorted Famous Monsters. Blue Beetle is not dissimilar to a few years ago when we had a spate of African-American superheroes with films such as The Meteor Man (1993), Blankman (1994) and Steel (1997) – where in all cases superherodom is seen as a form of empowerment where the hero ends up standing up for the neighbourhood, in this case against gentrification by a large corporation.
Blue Beetle is generally faithful to the comic-book original. The character of Jaime is changed somewhat, having been moved from his comic-book home of El Paso to the fictional Palmero City (location shooting in Puerto Rico). Jaime’s family is part of the comic-book, although as far as I can tell his Uncle Rudy is an addition to the fold. The previous Blue Beetles are wound in as part of the continuity and we see their costumes in the lair that is visited in mid-film, while a mid-credits coda contains a video message from Scott Kord. I wondered if the bug ship we get in the latter sections of the film was created for the film but a little search shows that the bug and the attendant weapons was part of the comic-book arsenal designed by Scott Kord. No mention is made of the Teen Titans.
The main problem that Blue Beetle has is that it comes out at a point when theatres are overwhelmed by superhero films and the general opinion is that the MCU has passed its peak. It enters into a crowded release schedule where it is just another superhero film. The unfortunately harsh reality is that while it is a perfectly competent piece of filmmaking it has nothing new to add to the fray other than the idea of a Latino superhero.
The Blue Beetle (Xolo Maridueña) in action
Angel Manuel Soto, who had previously made The Farm (2015) in his native Puerto Rico and the US-made Charm City Kings (2020), is competent in the director’s chair. However, the story we get is an utterly generic superhero origin story. The Evil Corporation with the plans to market the superhero tech as a super-solider outfit are about as generic as they get. Even the superheroic battles come with a seen-them-all-before feeling of ennui. I did like the cool effect of a bus being bifurcated in two lengthways as Jaime runs through it. And the scenes where the bug ship goes into action during the climactic scenes are fun.
The term Mary Sue was created in Star Trek fan-fiction in 1973, referring to characters that are often author’s wish-fulfilment fantasies who are either stunningly handsome and desired by the leads, have amazing or innate skills or powers, or win the day simply because they are likeable, cool or desired. Bella in the Twilight series is the perfect example of this. The male equivalent is a Gary Sue or Marty Stu. I would accuse Blue Beetle of creating a Gary Sue superhero. Everything that happens to Jaime throughout is handed to him or done for him by somebody else for the sole reason that he is a good-looking, nice kid. He gets taken over by a piece of alien tech that produces great powers – this is a familiar trope in superhero comics from Green Lantern’s ring to Spider-Man’s radioactive bite – but in this case he has a power suit that rivals Iron Man with no idea of how to use it – it even takes over and does his fighting for him. He does nothing to earn his powers – the scarab is just handed to him by a girl who stole it from a lab, which is more than Jaime ever does to earn anything throughout. Oh and she happens to be the heiress to a mega-corporation who takes a romantic shine to Jaime because he stood up to defend her in an argument. She also just happens to provide a mansion lair with its own version of a hi-tech Batcave and arsenal of armaments and a flying machine. Oh and Jaime also happens to have an unemployed uncle who seems to be a genius tinkerer who is capable of whipping up gadgets that can take down the hi-tech security of an entire corporation. It is hard to think of a superhero film where the hero at the centre of it has everything handed to them solely because they seem a nice guy.
Where Blue Beetle does get to be fun is in some of the supporting characters. Xolo Maridueña and Bruna Marquezine are bland and generic characters that pass you by without making any distinction. At age 76 and looking a good twenty years younger thanks to plastic surgery, Susan Sarandon steps into the sort of one-dimensional uber-bitch role as the CEO super-villain she was born to play – at one point, someone calls her Cruella and its seems perfectly on the nose. Jaime’s family end up gaining a more prominent role in the film than they did in the comic-book and provide a good deal of humour. Belissa Escobedo adds sarcastic colour to the early scenes and you end up wishing she had more to do in the rest of the film. The scenes with the assault on the fortress end up being stolen by Adriana Barraza as the gun-wielding grandmother. However, the one having the most fun throughout is George Lopez as the dotty uncle with a penchant for conspiracy theories and a dab hand with homemade gadgetry.
