Main cast: Xolo Maridueña (Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle), Adriana Barraza (Nana Reyes), Damián Alcázar (Alberto Reyes), Elpidia Carrillo (Rocio Reyes), Bruna Marquezine (Jenny Kord), Raoul Max Trujillo (Ignacio Carapax), Belissa Escobedo (Milagro Reyes), Harvey Guillén (Dr Jose Francisco Morales Rivera de la Cruz), Susan Sarandon (Victoria Kord), and George Lopez (Rudy Reyes)
Director: Ángel Manuel Soto
Another DCEU movie, another dud.
Blue Beetle kind of asks for its fate, though, as it resorts to the kind of anti-marketing tactic that no longer works in a time when people have stopped caring. That’s right, practically all its marketing goes into telling me that it has a “diverse cast”—Hollywood-speak for “people that aren’t white”, which is how a cast comprising mostly people of the same non-white ethnicity is still considered “diverse”.
As per the playbook, such representation is important because it saves lives or something, and anyone that doesn’t give the people behind this thing billions of dollars is a racist, sexist, homophobe, and other convenient “It’s never me, it’s you!” excuses for their own shortcomings. Then come the tedious insults against capitalization, which makes me do a big eye roll because this is a movie from a huge studio and not some indie flick, and the lead actor as well as the director all acting like self-important blowhards on social media.
All that noise just drives people away because by now, many have learned to associate such marketing tactic with mediocre movies that have nothing going for them aside from tedious identity politics.
Indeed, that’s what this movie is. It’s very average with a dumb plot. Is it the worst thing ever? Not really, but it may as well be because the marketing for it is terrible. Instead of highlighting the high points of this movie, the people involved start picking fights with and flinging insults at their target audience, which naturally works against them as the box office numbers would reveal.
The plot has been described as, er, inspired by Spider-Man’s origin, mostly because Jaime Reyes gets the Scarab thing that allows him to become Blue Beetle after wandering around a laboratory, but I personally would say that there is also a sprinkling of Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor thrown in.
Now, because this is a progressive movie that is all about Latin representation, it changes the back story of Jaime Reyes a bit in that this time around, he sort of steals the Scarab and then touches it with his itchy fingers. Well, that makes perfect sense, as we all know authentic Latin people only get what they deserve by stealing them!
Okay, he doesn’t directly steals them. Jenny Kord, the daughter of his employer Victoria Kord, steals it first and then passes it to Jaime, because she is disgusted that her mother is using the Scarab to do heinous experiments for clearly nefarious purposes. The female Norman Osborn naturally wants it back and sends her goons to retrieve it by force or, well, more force.
Fortunately, the Scarab is an intelligent, sentient thing called Khaji-Da, and she bonds with Jaime to a degree that she can take control of his body and creates an nifty exoskeleton so that he can now do superhero things as Blue Beetle without getting perforated with bullets and other trivial nuisances.
Okay, let’s get to my opinion of this thing. It’s very uninspired. The story is composed of tired old tropes of family, dead father figures appearing in a dream at a penultimate moment to energize the hero to make one last and triumphant rally against the bad guys, and so forth.
Watching this movie is like eating one more time another meal that I’d eaten way too many times, and a part of me feels like retching because familiarity really breeds contempt in this case. I’m bored, and I feel even more so as the movie keeps going. Giving this derivative trope regurgitation a Latino skin suit doesn’t make it any better.
The guy playing the lead character is super bland here, and it doesn’t help that his character is one of those annoying young brats that whine a lot but doesn’t really do anything to improve the situation.
In fact, early on, his family desperately needs money to avoid eviction from their home, so his sister gets him a job as the household help in Victoria Kord’s home. What does he do? Well, he goes all ooh, he’s better than this, sticks his nose into where it doesn’t belong, and gets both himself and his sister fired. In fact, him becoming the Blue Beetle ends up putting his whole family in danger many times, and even leads to his father getting a heart attack, and it never seems to occur to him that maybe, if he loves his family as much as he claims to, he should have just called it a day and get an actual job.
Susan Sarandon cackles and snarls a lot, but her character is another forgettable one. The actor spends quite a bit of time talking about how her character represents toxic white capitalism or something, but that’s just overstating the character by a lot. Victoria Kord is just a boring, one-note villain that feels as intimidating as an ant crawling up one’s leg.
Meanwhile, the efforts of this thing to make some kind of white people suck statement also falls flat because most of the time, it makes Jaime look like the whining asshole instead. For example, Victoria is busy on the phone, so she couldn’t notice the annoying help acting like he wants attention and he wants it now, so he pronounces all white people as arrogant assholes that look down on others. No, in this case, he’s just the entitled douchebag acting like he’s the one that is superior to everyone.
Oh, and walking around the employer’s house like it’s his, touching things here and there… this guy is an awful help. I would have fired him too, and I’m not white!
The story is dumb in other ways too.
For example, Jenny wants to get the Scarab out from her villainous mom’s clutches, so she passes it to someone she barely knows. Then again, she asks Jaime to meet her at her mother’s office and then acts shocked when she sees him there, so maybe this young lady is mentally deficient. Oh, and she’s the usual “I don’t need no man!” type that acts like she is right in everything, even as her actions initiate a tragic chain of events that put Jaime and his family in mortal danger. Then again, she’s a girlboss, and girlbosses can’t be held accountable for their actions! Whoever disagrees is clearly a sexist!
No, wait, my favorite is how Jaime and Khaji-Da decide to part ways because he doesn’t want to kill people… right after he’d slaughtered various employees of Victoria Kord that are just doing their jobs in order to get paid. I guess those mooks don’t matter, huh?
I can’t help feeling that this is some standard, super generic made-for-the-CW show that has all kinds of social issue statements inserted because it’s trendy to do this plus hello ESG, even if these social issue statements contradict brutally with what actually takes place on the screen. This only makes the main characters, especially Jaime, hypocritical at best and brutally stupid at worst.
Meanwhile, the aesthetics of the movie make me think of some Spy Kids-ish garish color salad, further cementing my impression that this is more akin to an overlong pilot of a CW series that was never picked up, thrown up at the unsuspecting public because Warner Bros Pictures is addicted to losing money.
Anyway, this is one forgettable entertainment-free dud, never bad enough to be entertaining in a perverse way, while never good enough to make it worth my time. I’d recommend watching Guyver: Dark Hero for a far more entertaining take on the living exoskeleton thing. Stay away from the first one, The Guyver, though—it’s nearly as dull and forgettable as this film!
