(THE WAHSINGTON POST) – “Blue Beetle,” the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.
First the good news: As the protagonist Jaime Reyes, Xolo Maridueña (“Cobra Kai”) is enormously appealing. When we meet him, Jaime has just graduated from college with big dreams, the first in his Mexican American family to do so.
The first Latino actor in a title role for DC Comics, the 22-year-old actor has charisma to burn, and he is helped in that department by veteran George Lopez as Uncle Rudy, a justifiably paranoid, anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-superhero technology whiz with a chip on his shoulder who provides most of the cynical humour in the film.
“Batman is a fascist,” Rudy cracks at one point. Later, he shouts, “Down with the imperialists!” before marshalling an attack against the forces of the villain: a titan of the American military-industrial complex named Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), who is hoping to harness the power of alien biotechnology to develop a private police force of cybernetic goons called the One Man Army Corps.
It is that very biotechnology, courtesy of a kind of scarab-shaped A.I. known as Khaji-Da (voice of singer Becky G), that chooses Jaime as its “host,” propelling him into the titular role of reluctant superhero as it fuses with him symbiotically, in body and brain, granting him the power of flight, a bulletproof suit and the ability to generate whatever weapon his mind might conceive. We have all seen this part before.
But it is the embrace of Mexican American culture that gives the film its most interesting texture. Jaime lives with his sister (Belissa Escobedo), their parents (Elpidia Carrillo and Damián Alcázar), Rudy and matriarch Nana (Adriana Barraza) under one roof in the Edge Keys, a fictional immigrant suburb of the fictional Texas coastal metropolis of Palmera City, vividly rendered by production designer Jon Billington, director Angel Manuel Soto and writer Gareth Dunnet Alcocer.
Frequent Spanish dialogue, sometimes subtitled and sometimes not, respects the authenticity of the characters and their lived experience. (Nana watches the Mexican telenovela “María del Barrio,” and clips of the superhero cartoon character El Chapulin Colorado, which aptly translates to the Red Cricket, are scattered throughout the film.)
A heart-warming theme of family also looms large. After Jaime is captured by Victoria and her One Man Army Corps henchman (Raoul Max Trujillo), a cyber soldier called Conrad Carapax in the comics but here referred to as Ignacio Carapax, and with a dark backstory involving the controversial School of the Americas run by the US Army, said to be a training ground for Latin America dictators, torturers and assassins, it is not the Justice League but his family who comes to rescue Jaime. This includes Nana, who possesses some surprising (and amusing) skills of her own.
It is his love for his family that makes Jaime weak, Carapax tells him. But after Victoria sends a militarised private SWAT team to raid the Reyes house one night, an all too disturbingly realistic encounter, and tragedy ensues, his mother tells Jaime, “Use the pain we’re feeling and turn it into power.”
So much for the good stuff. Like many of its DC Comics predecessors, “Blue Beetle” embraces the dark, leaning on such themes as class, racism, American colonialism, economic inequality and the surveillance state. In a running joke, Victoria persists in calling one of her underlings (Harvey Guillén) Sanchez, though that is not his name.
That is all valid, and it lends the film grit that grounds the fantastical story. But at the same time, the movie too often forgets to have, you know, fun. Ultimately, it devolves into the kind of chaotic clash of robot-suited antagonists that has become, in this era of the comic movie, demoralizingly repetitive and, dare I say it, boring.
A subplot involving the mysterious disappearance of a character from the comics, Ted Kord, one of two original Blue Beetles and the brother of Victoria, is introduced in the first few minutes, and threads throughout the plot, via Ted’s daughter, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who appears as Jaime’s love interest.
This secondary storyline and the post-credits cliff-hanger stinger it spawns will mainly be of interest to fans of the comics. “Maybe it’s time we get our own hero,” says Rudy, the most outspoken advocate of the film’s message of empowerment. He is right, of course, and for that we can be grateful. – Michael O’Sullivan
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Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At theaters. Contains sequences of action and violence, strong language, and some suggestive and drug references. In English and Spanish with some subtitles. 127 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.
