Blue Beetle (2023)
Blue Beetle is a thrilling and amusing superhero romp, with star making performances by lead actors Xolo Maridueña and Bruna Marquezine.
To be fair, Xolo Maridueña is already known for his star making role in the successful series Cobra Kai, but his vivid performance here should cement his status as a bonafide movie star.
Maridueña plays Jaime Reyes, who returns home to Palmera City in the Edge Keys, after graduating from college. Only to find out that a lot has changed in his absence.
His loving family is about to lose their hard-earned house and home to cruel and greedy Kord Industries, led by Viktoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon in full Evil Hilary-mode.
To survive, Jaime and his sister find themselves working (and losing) a lowly cleaners job at the Kord family mansion, which leads to a chance meeting with Viktoria’s rebel daughter Jenny, played with gusto by Marquezine. It’s pretty clear that somewhere along the way they are meant to fall in love, but that is part of the fun too.
This chance encounter and a visit to Kord Industries the next day sets the plot proper of the movie in motion. This concerns an alien relic called The Scarabee which chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, bestowing the teenager with a suit of armor that's capable of extraordinary powers and changing his destiny by turning him into superhero Blue Beetle. But Kord Industries wants to gain possession of Jaime’s Blue Beetle powers, by any means necessary and either dead or alive will do.
The DC comic book movie was written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and directed by Angel Manuel Soto, who previously directed the feature film Twelve.
They do a very capable job of turning what could have been another fairly predictable origin story into an unexpected treat that manages to both surprise and delight.
It’s the kind of movie where Jaime’s Nana (Adriana Barraza) turns out to have a revolutionary past - I’m looking forward to spin-off movie Grandma with Guns - while George Lopez steals quite a few scenes as an anti-imperialist ass-kicker.
Blue Beetle is infused with a Latin spirit, that greatly enlivens proceedings, while the stakes are kept admirably low - Jaime doesn’t need to save the world, he just wants to save his family, Jenny and, okay, himself, while Soto delivers action scenes that recall nineties action Schwarzenegger movies - and yeah, I mean that as a compliment.
The musical choices are appropriate too. One climactic scene is set to I Ain’t Going Out Like To That by Cypress Hill, which works just as well as The Beastie Boys No Sleep Til Brooklyn did in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3.
As a movie, though, Blue Beetle is closer in spirit to the first Shazam film: a family friendly movie that also plays well with an older audience.
Note: Starting this week, Blue Beetle is released in most countries across the globe.