No more “resets”. Enough plundering of B- and C-tier comic-book assets. The recent offerings from both Marvel and DC mount the best possible argument for scorched earth. Blue Beetle, with the best will in the world, is not going to save the latter stable: it’s predicted to flop even harder than The Flash did.
Unfortunately, it deserves to. The film has an eager Latinx cast who aren’t to blame for how powerfully boring it is – that’s the script’s fault. As good an actress as Adriana Barraza (Babel) must spoof her entire life experience for cheap laughs as a bad-ass abuela (Spanish for grandma). The Reyes family, to whom hero Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) belongs, are cut from the Disney-ish cloth of those clans from Coco and Encanto. It’s hard to celebrate much of a win for representation here when the collective portrait is such a yabbering cliché.
DC aficionados could tell you all about the mystical scarab conferring a suit of armour on three different characters in the canon. I’m afraid I couldn’t care less – but Jaime is the third of these. The alien artifact that latches itself to him, much prized by the military-industrial complex, is in the clutches of evil imperialist Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon, doing such phoned-in work you’d think she was shilling for AT&T). Her niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine) liberates the scarab, and Jaime gets the brunt of it when it leaps onto his face, endowing his physique with a gleaming blue exoskeleton.
In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.
