Jaime Reyes suddenly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology called the Scarab. When the Scarab chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he's bestowed with an incredible suit of armor that's capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the superhero Blue Beetle. Tasked with turning a new page in a “rebirth” of the DC Universe after The Flash reset the timeline, director Angel Manuel Soto comes in to direct the superhero origin story of Jaime Reyes, AKA, Blue Beetle. Before I dive in to my review, I’d like to preface things by saying I really do like the Blue Beetle character, particularly from the show Young Justice. I also think that Xolo Maridueña is an immensely talented young man who seems like a super chill guy and has really proven himself to be totally capable lead actor as Miguel in Cobra Kai, which is a terrific show. Taking these things into account, I was hoping that Blue Beetle would be at least a serviceable start to this new wave of DC Universe films.
Unfortunately, Blue Beetle is just another blandly generic, cliché ridden, and factory made superhero origin story that is completely derivative in all the worst ways. Let’s start with the few positives. Xolo himself fits quite well in the roll of Jaime Reyes and does as good of a job as he can to make the most of a hackneyed script. The Blue Beetle suit itself looks very comic accurate and whenever Jaime goes into action with the suit, there are some pretty cool moments that reminded me of the Injustice video game. That’s pretty much it for positives. Firstly, the relationship between Jaime and the Scarab is completely underdeveloped and the movie spends a lot of time with the two of them being separate. Unlike in the Young Justice show that goes deeply into the complex dynamic between the Scarab and Jaime, this movie completely rushes through all of that development and we’re somehow supposed to believe by the third act that the two of them have become symbiotic.
Victoria Kord, the corporate villain of Kord Industries played by Susan Sarandon is just your average exposition dumping mouthpiece that only serves to spoon-feed mind numbing explanations to the audience in the most boring way possible. It doesn’t help that her henchman, the Indestructible Man played by Raoul Max Trujillo, is yet another standard one note baddie whose dialogue is so predictable that I was able to foresee almost every single line he said. So I saw this movie with a predominately Latino audience and I think it’s great that the Latino community is finally getting some representation in the superhero genre, especially with a fun character like Blue Beetle. The problem is that the Reyes family dynamic here is full of overdone stereotypes and on the nose tropes in its portrayal of an American Latino family that even my Latino friends I saw it with also found a lot of the jokes to be heavy handed and unfunny. It’s like Hollywood wants to make Latino families look like bumbling idiots who embody all the exaggerated traits of characters from Novela soap operas.
George Lopez’s Rudy character and Jaime’s grandmother are prime examples of this. Lopez has some of the absolute worst jokes in the film, calling Batman a “fascist” and going on a rant about how the United States is “locking Mexicans in cages.” Yeah, it’s that bad. Then again, this is a movie where the grandmother picks up a laser gun and miraculously takes out an entire battalion of highly trained mercenaries. Jaime’s love interest Jenny Kord, played by Bruna Marquezine, is quite wooden and unlikable. I kid you not, there’s a line in which she says it’s “sexist” that she didn’t get her father’s inheritance. Just egregious. The pacing is also brutal. Running over two hours, it feels like two and a half to three hours by the time it ends.
Before I get torched in the comments as someone who “can’t have fun” or doesn’t like these types of films, no one has been more supportive of the DC Extended Universe than I have. I’ve been quite forgiving than most critics towards “just average” DCEU flicks such as Black Adam and The Flash, have been adamantly outspoken in my support for Zack Snyder’s trilogy, and gave very positive reviews to non-Snyder entries such as the first Shazam, Wonder Woman, and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. The poor marketing, DC being in a transition that confuses average movie goers, and the director talking smack behind the scenes all point to this film bombing extremely hard at the box office. Overall, the highly talented Xolo Maridueña brings as much charisma as he can to what is unfortunately just another generic superhero origin story with brutal pacing, a derivative script, dull acting, and an astonishing amount of unfunny and overplayed stereotypes on the Latino community. Not a promising start for this new wave of DC Universe movies and I believe that this movie’s failure at the box office will be a testament to how bad things have gotten ever since WB decided not to continue the extended universe story that Zack Snyder brought to life ten years ago.
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