The DCU Knocks it Out the Park with First Latino Lead Superhero Blue Beetle Movie

Warner Brothers has finally begun to embrace more of its old-school comic books with the first Latino Superhero to join the DCEU. While Blue Beetle isn’t a part of James Gunn's DC Reboot, this live-action adaptation brings to the big screen a character that is beloved by old-school comic book fans of the original Blue Beetle that was published by the Fox Feature Syndicate in 1939.

In this “Blue Beetle,” we follow our protagonist “Jamie”, played by Xolo Maridueña seen in Cobra Kai, as he is chosen by an alien life form to take him from everyday 20-something to a superhero.  As this story takes off, we meet Jamie as a young college grad struggling to figure out his purpose in life after living the “American Dream”. He is now living with his abuela played by Adriana Barraza, his little sister played by Belissa Escobedo, his grandpa played by Damián Alcázar, and his conspiracist uncle played by George Lopez. After his sister gets him a dead-end job as a cleaner, scraping gum from tables, he runs into a wealthy tech heiress “Jenny Kord", played by Bruna Marquezine, of Kord Industries, where he is given the “Blue Beetle” scarab in its dormant state. After successfully getting the scarab home, the alien lifeform activates, picking Jamie as the new Blue Beetle and host. In this world, Kord Industries is pushing to harness the power of the scarab after struggling to activate it for years. They hope to create a new superhuman cyborg army by using the tech they currently make and fusing it with this alien tech that is now living in Jamie. Jamie now stands between Kord’s new world order and global domination. In the story industrialist villainess Victoria Cord, sets out to extract the scarab from Jamie by force, but he finds that his family and faith will protect him from her wrath. 

To start, this film IS destined to be a crowd-pleaser that centers around family, and heritage, and introduces Blue Beetle to a more mature teenage audience and adult comic book fans. While much of the film takes place in fictional, the futuristic suburb of “El Paso” certainly delivers a futuristic vibe with a synth-wave soundtrack. Before this film, the DCEU had not brought many of its diverse comic book characters to the silver screen, so Blue Beetle is hopefully the first of many. Covering topics like government imperialism, and gentrification, and including countless callbacks to Latino cultural references establish the idea that when the heroes are diverse they can take on diverse world-building issues. This movie was not made with everyone in mind and yet, I found myself enjoying that other people saw themselves and their families/communities in this film.

Unfortunately, in an age of “superhero fatigues,” this film powers through the box office noise with a strong cultural lens, but it still struggles to stand on its own two feet in the category of originality and commercial appeal. As Spanglish dialogue and niché cultural references kept the theater full of laughter, at times I knew that certain jokes in the film were not intended for me. While I was certainly okay with that, I know some will feel like this film did not speak to them and share it’s more generic feeling story for a “specific” more diverse audience. 

Jamie’s scrappy family carrying the B story offers a different superhero perspective that electrifies the story in Act III, however, this also counterproductively accentuates Jamie's passivity as a hero which compromises both himself and his family and even leads to the death of his grandfather.  

The villains all seem a bit shallow and poorly executed overall, which becomes a major weak spot in the film. I think extending the runtime of the film or cutting some of the earlier “discovery of his powers'' bit at the beginning of the movie could have allowed us to have a deeper relationship with the henchman “Ignacio Carapax”. We hurriedly find out he was a child soldier in a five-minute flashback just before he kills Victoria Kord, but all the while we take away that he is just an evil henchman. That backstory would have been good to know much sooner in the film and given more context to the robot showdown that happens at the end of the movie. This adjustment would have driven the villain's arc much harder home and raised the stakes for the villain in the film. 

Victoria Kord played by “Susan Surandon '' was truly underwhelming and perhaps presents a symptom of a larger problem in diversifying action films. Writing a female antagonist with such a masculine-coded character motivation dulls the true ability for us to root for the bad guy in her. She is driven by domination, greed, money, and all of the other delights of the capitalist patriarchy but the origins of this character's evil ways and why she has emptied her moral compass and filled it with these “evil” virtues are not expounded upon much further than in the clunky dialogue. Traditionally when the “stoic corporate villain” trope is used for a man, we see the troubled background of the character and can sympathize with his dark motivations, but we missed that with Kord in a way that could have been impactful. Kord’s villain origin story is dense and expositional and her desire to retrieve the scarab. The Victoria storyline fails to stick the landing since we don’t spend that much time diving into Kord’s childhood, family, and general beliefs as a villain and why the stakes for her are so big. More importantly in that storyline, we also don’t understand WHY she has chosen to live her life in this way besides her hunger to “move up” and be finally recognized for her brilliance. 

Overall, the action sequences kept my interest, the romantic arc sensitive and progressive between Jamie and Jenny, and most importantly the family's role as Jamie's sidekick was brilliant enough to call this a “risen and repeat” superhero film. While the film leans on tropes to move the narrative arch along, it offers a different Latin X lens on a story that still feels and sounds familiar to me, yet fresh for the silver screen. The “war-obsessed technocrat driven to destroy everything around them, including the superhero” trope seems like a very familiar superhero story because it unfortunately is. We’ve seen this before in countless other superheroes in the DC and Marvel universe, however many of the other characters go at their villain on their own using their smarts or good virtues. In Blue Beetle, we enjoy the family dynamic interacting with the overall goal to rescue Jenny and defeat Kord.

Blue Beetle is scheduled to come on Max shortly and is now showing in theaters.