Blue Beetle Review

Loners, eccentrics and enigmas. DC's biggest superheroes - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel - are hardly the type you want to share a shawarma with. Enter Blue Beetle - DC's answer to Marvel's Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman. A young, relatable, middle-class-born superhero that softens the gritty line-up of this franchise.

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Mariduena) aka Blue Beetle, the 22-year-old living with loud familia, is who you want to call on when bad guys raid your suburban Latino street. Afterwards you can thank him with nachos and frijoles. And if you are curious, he may even let you get a look at the cobalt-blue "scarab" permanently embedded into his back. Most of DC's senior superheroes are concerned with "justice" or "protecting the world from alien powers", but Blue Beetle's buzzwords are "family" & "community". It is about protecting his neighbourhood from the clutches of exploitative entities like Kord Industries. Before Jaime Reyes makes it onto the frontlines, though, he must accept his fate as the Blue Beetle.

Director Angel Soto infuses this origin story with warmth and plenty of Latino humour. Jaime (pronounced "Hi May") dreams of lifting his hardworking, immigrant folks out of perpetual precariousness of the residents of Edge Keys. So when Jennifer Kord (Bruna Marquezine), niece to the CEO of Kord Industries Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), offers him a job at the conglomerate, he jumps at it.

But instead of a job, a visibly flustered Jenny offers him a hamburger takeaway box, warning him to never open it and to safeguard it with his life. At Reyes family dinner table, Jaime's sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) bullies him into opening it anyway. Inside, next to a half-eaten packet of french fries, sits a radiant blue beetle, looking like nothing more than an ornate paperweight. But when Jaime holds the bug, it springs to life, lunges onto his face, and to his utter horror, crawls up his bum and embeds itself in his back. Then, the fun begins.

This early scene sets the tone for Blue Beetle's ethos. Unlike Peter Parker's first day as Spiderman where he is all alone in his room, Jaime's transformation plays out in full glory in front of his family. His mama, apá and abuelo, sister Milli, and eccentric-tinkerer uncle Rudy (George Lopez) scream and furiously pray as they witness the scarab melding with Jaime's body and unfurling a blue exoskeleton suit with retractable "legs" on his back. When he shoots out into the atmosphere, punching a hole through their roof, and then falls back down naked, his mother throws a blanket over his butt. His family isn't just witness to his new avatar, they become the very reason he accepts his fate as the Chosen One.

Unlike, say, Iron Man's suit which follows the commands it's given, the scarab is revealed as a sentient being named "Khaji-Da". It activates by fusing with its host - Jaime - until the two become a symbiotic whole.

Soto expertly toggles between the fun and family drama without letting one aspect diminish the other. Still, the whimsicality is not enough to make Blue Beetle break free of the genre's biggest tropes. Such as its outlandish villain Victoria Kord who wants to control the entire world with her new weapon, One Man Army Corps (OMAC) - an exoskeleton derived from Khaji-Da. Sarandon isn't convincing or particularly scary as a rogue, power-mad CEO. And her bodyguard and OMAC lab rat, Carapax (Raul Trujillo), is a cartoonishly muscled thug.

The focus being on the family, the casting for that is more than perfect. Adriana Barraza as the sweet abuelo who taps into a revolutionary past to unload a torrent of bullets into Victoria's henchmen gives us one of the most mass moments of the movie. Belissa as Milli is a sheer delight to watch. Xolo's boyish charm, with a light touch of cockiness he brings to Jaime's character, makes him a very agreeable superhero. But the surprise element - the zing, pop, crackle of the film - is George Lopez, who steals the show as Uncle Rudy.

I could say the Blue Beetle marks a breakthrough moment in Latina representation in the superhero universe. But when the counter on the word "family" soars higher with every dialogue, it starts to feel like the makers are milking the nana sentiment for all its worth and layering Latino identity on top just for brownie points. Still, it at least made me feel something - which is more than most superhero films evoke in me these days.