Blue Beetle

Scarab Days

Blue Beetle
Directed by Angel Manuel Soto
USA/Mexico 2023 Warner Bros/DC
UK cinema release print

I wasn’t expecting much from the new DC franchise movie Blue Beetle, to be honest. Since learning of James Gunn’s negation of all the good stuff which would have been coming in the current DC cinematic universe, scheduled to reach a premature end with the second Aquaman movie, I’ve kinda lost faith in the franchise. That being said, it’s been a good year for DC movies with the only ‘not so hot’ one in the bunch this year being The Flash (reviewed here). But Black Adam (reviewed here) and Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (reviewed here) were both great and so, yeah, I’m not a fan of Gunn’s new direction for DC, truth be told (even though he made the fifth best movie in the modern DC universe with his pseudo-sequel The Suicide Squad, reviewed here).

Now, I put off seeing this new movie by a couple of weeks. Firstly, it wasn’t showing in a straight 2D showing unless you wanted to go in a lunch hour for the first couple of weeks (and even with a Cineworld card, they now make you pay extra for seeing it on an IMAX or SuperScreen) and, I was thinking of giving it a miss altogether because... oh yeah... I’d seen the trailer. Probably one of the worst trailers for a movie I’ve seen in a long time and, even though it does capture some of the spirit of the film, it redirects the story beats to something which is going to appeal specifically to a teenage market and, while it’s partially true of the movie too, there’s a lot more going on in this one than just that.

And, to be honest, this is not the Blue Beetle I was looking for, from the trailer at least. For starters, for all this talk of it being a DC character... well... it wasn’t always. Fox Comics, Holyoke Publishing and even the prestigious Charlton Comics had the rights to various versions of the character over the decades before DC bought it in 1983. But the character’s first appearance was in issue one of Mystery Men Comics from late 1939... and that’s the version I would have preferred to see. A proper superhero movie set in the 1930s or 40s. Instead, this latest version of the character is based on one of the ‘pass the torch’ legacy inheritors of the character which DC created much later. That being said, the story does incorporate one of the earlier versions of the Blue Beetle character in its DNA and the first of two post credits scenes certainly follows up on that idea for future movies. Such a pity then that none of the epilogue scenes in any of the DC movies from the last couple of years are going to get picked up for future releases and come to any kind of fruition. We’re almost at the end of the line with this iteration of the DCU now, it’s sad to say.

So it makes it even more of a sting, then, that I’d have to report that, despite all the odds, Blue Beetle is one heck of a great movie. Yeah, it does all the origin and ultra-stylised comic book violence that they all do but, you know what, it really takes its time getting to all of that stuff and even then, the focus of the film is not so much on the inevitable action set pieces which are peppered throughout the movie... it’s about characters. Specifically the family of the title character Jaime, played by Xolo Maridueña. He’s the one who gets bitten by the bug or, rather, chosen by an alien tech scarab to be a human host for a symbiotic relationship between this struggling teenager and a lethal doomsday device. But it's as much about his father (Damián Alcázar), mother (Elpidia Carrillo), sister (Belissa Escobedo), nan (Adriana Barraza... who steals the show during the third act) and uncle (George Lopez.. who similarly enhances every scene he’s in)... not to mention Jaime’s new love interest, rich white kid Jenny (Bruna Marquezine) who plays the daughter of Susan Sarandon’s lead villain.

It’s a film which is totally driven to building up the characters and letting the audience see into their family values. A group of Mexicans who are used to the hardships in the world and who are willing to do what it takes to go and rescue their kid when he eventually falls into the clutches of the evil tech firm who has been searching for the scarab for years... with the grandmother drawing on her former adventures as a Mexican revolutionary and wielding a high tech chaingun against the enemy with sheer delight.

And, although the lead character is singularly uninteresting in terms of how he’s been written, he’s competently performed and, fortunately, everyone else around him is interesting enough to lift the movie from being the mess it could have been to, something far more interesting, entertaining and... I almost hate to say it... but incredibly moving too. This film hits emotional highs and lows which not a lot of superhero movies seem to aspire to these days... or at least, if they do, it’s a bit hit and miss as to whether they pull those elements off well or not.

So, yeah, not much else to say about this one other than, the music is okay. It’s a curious electronic/orchestral fused concoction which manages to hold its own against the more action paced scenes and doesn’t feel like its getting in the way. But, yeah, not much else of any note.

Blue Beetle is a surprisingly good superhero movie in a year when the genre has seen a fair few good examples released, with the lowest box office you would expect from any of them. I think we’re finally beginning to see superhero fatigue set in with audiences and, that’s not a bad thing to be honest... as long as the films don’t totally dissappear like the American Western did at some point when the audience grew tired of them (or at least didn’t contribute to the box office). In terms of other DC characters appearing... none of them make it into this film but a few of them get some textual and visual references (for instance, Jaime wears a Gotham University t-shirt at one point). But, yeah, not a bad film I would say and certainly don’t be put off by the trailer. It is that film they are selling... but it’s something else too.