Rent Blue Beetle (2023)

Blue Beetle review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Blue Beetle arrives as a fairly welcome change of pace for the DC Comics movies. Previous films have always felt like they were trying to be massive epics of morally ambiguous characters in narratives that border on pretentious, considering the stakes. By comparison, Blue Bettle is a more grounded superhero for fitting more of a classic underdog superhero style. It’s a shame that his first film arrives at the tail-end of the trainwreck that was the DCEU and appears more like an afterthought, despite this picture being rescued from a Max-streaming exclusive and being given the more traditional theatrical release.

It’s easy enough to cheer on Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña), a college graduate hoping to prove himself to his struggling family. When money becomes an issue, he attempts to climb the ladder fast at Kord Industries. His pushing into the industry attracts the attention of the forgiving Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine) and the less kind CEO Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon). His involvement makes him the unfortunate subject of the company’s latest discovery, an alien artifact known as the Scarab. When the Scarab attaches itself to his back, Jaime is bestowed an alien armor, system, and weapons to become the Blue Beetle.

Blue Beetle is compelling in how Jaime struggles to learn everything there is to know about his alien suit with a mind of its own. He’s still getting used to it, and there’s something to be said of the surreal horror that gets evoked when he transforms for the first time around his screaming family. His family reacts in a different way with a story that does an okay job of weaving the entire Reyes family into the mix. Jaime's uncle, Rudy (George Lopez), is kind of fun as a paranoid scientist who gets creeped out around surveillance and makes such charged statements about how Batman is a fascist. Jaime’s grandmother, Nana (Adriana Barraza), becomes a hardened warrior when the chips are down, evoking a solid slice of absurdity.

This film could use way more charisma than the mere nuggets that the film parses out. The central story is not all that compelling, considering it has the look and feel of a low-rent Iron Man. Jaime struggles to become the Blue Beetle like Tony Stark, getting new tech involuntarily lodged in his body. He also has to fight a bigger suit in the form of Ignacio Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), playing the armored villain OMAC. The inevitable fight between Blue Beetle and OMAC is decently staged, and it does try to evoke more of an emotional drive for the dark history of the Kord family. It still arrives, however, in an expected manner where the competent CGI ends up being more compelling than whether or not Jaime and his Scarab will survive another day.

Oddly enough, Blue Beetle is an aggressively average superhero film, which might’ve been exactly what Warner Bros wanted. After dreadful misfires in the narrative messes of Batman v. Superman, Justice League, and Wonder Woman 1984, they needed something more grounded. The good news is that Blue Beetle is highly watchable by these rocky standards. The bad news is that it does little to set itself apart from the myriad of other superhero movies out there. It’s at least a more charming superhero film for the family in the same realm as DC’s Shazam. Unlike Shazam, however, Blue Beetle needs an extra boost of fun and character moments to be a better film rather than a passive superhero experience of a new character in an old outfit.