Blue Beetle (2023)

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) has just returned from college to his very quirky, his oh so very very quirky, family in DC’s version of Florida. A college degree means very little apart from student loan when you’re from a brown and poor family – however quirky it may be – so Jaime has a life of crappy servitude to look forward to, like many of us. A series of accidents leads him on the path to Destiny, though, and he’s soon starting in on the superhero business when an ancient alien symbiote chooses him as its new host, turning him into what we’ll just call the Blue Beetle. He certainly has better symbiote luck as his colleagues over at Marvel.

Evil rich white villain Vicoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) wants control over the symbiote to build an army of OMACs – stupidly without the mohawks so important to that role - so Jaime and his oh so very quirky family have a bit of an uphill battle in front of them. On the plus side, Jaime also gets his mandatory love interest in form of Victoria’s niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who, not being white and young and hot, gets a rich but not evil exception.

Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle is a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating and generally pretty likeable attempt at a superhero movie, never to be followed up by DC of course. I really do appreciate that it tries to add a bit of talk about class to its typically US-centric thinking about race, and how much it lacks mean-spiritedness even when talking about the groups it is okay to be rather essentialist about when one is in the trenches of the US culture wars. Of course, part of its use of class fantasizes about some inherent goodness and solidarity of the poor amongst one another, which is about as kitschy and untruthful a portrayal of the actual experience of being poor as possible. Fun fact: a lot of poor people suck as much as most rich people, they just don’t have the power to express that as destructively.

On the other hand, I’m now complaining that a superhero movie’s politics are lacking in subtlety; newsflash for me: superheroes aren’t subtle, aren’t meant to be subtle, and should be praised for actually putting some effort into politics beyond mere representation, so Blue Beetle certainly deserves that.

Rather more easy for me to appreciate about the film is its total aesthetic focus on garish neon colours, where nothing isn’t made better by glowing. There’s a verve and energy to the visual style that certainly helps provide the action set pieces with a very individual look and some personality.

Part of that personality is somewhat goofy, but then, one of the script’s main problems is that it wants to be funny more often than it actually is, a problem that isn’t helped by a tendency to repeat jokes in slightly revised form sometimes three scenes after another.

Timing is a bit of a problem for the film in general: some dialogue lines seem curiously misplaced, coming a scene or thirty seconds too early or too late for full effect. There’s a sloppiness here that surprises on this budget level. If this sloppiness is caused by the script or by the film’s editing is anyone’s guess. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for despite my gripes, there’s quite bit of fun to be had with Blue Beetle. If it were a bit tighter, it would probably even be a whole lot of that.