For a long while, there had seemed an endless appetite for superhero stories, crowds rushing to and cheering at exhaustively interconnected adventures of good v evil even as critics started to sour. But in the last year, that bad taste has slowly spread, underwhelming box office showing that there is in fact a limit to how many capes and crusaders audiences can tolerate.
The combined US box office of Black Adam, Shazam 2, Morbius, The Flash and Ant Man 3 couldn’t even rival what the last Spider-Man made in its entire run, the scraping of the superhero barrel loud enough to repel even the most invested of fans. It’s been a particularly rough time for DC (its Batgirl film was canned before it was even finished), rough enough for an entirely new direction to be instated, ushered in by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. But before his universe comes to be (his first offering will be something we all definitely need: another Superman reboot), there are a couple of stragglers, the first of which arrives weighted down by another kind of expectation.
As the first solo film for a Latino superhero, Blue Beetle carries that awfully unfair baggage the first of anything comes saddled with, its box office performance likely to be quoted by execs in the future, for better or worse. But no film would be able to save an entire cinematic universe and act as proof that a specific brand of representation is commercially lucrative, especially one that’s as low-key as Blue Beetle, originally intended for a straight-to-stream slot, often feeling a little out of place on the big screen. Unlike DC’s more rotten recent titles though, it’s mostly rather entertaining, acceptable late summer fodder, a huge leap above say Black Adam or The Flash, despite the lower budget and lower wattage cast, a minor win for a company sorely in need of one.
It’s an origin story of loose familiarity given a few fresh licks of paint, of college graduate Jaime (a charming Xolo Maridueña) returning home with great ambition for the future only to be reminded of the hardship of his Mexican-American family’s present. Gentrification is edging them out, putting their long-term home at risk, led by the all-consuming Kord Industries, obnoxious big business at its most destructive, headed up by the power-hungry Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon). Jaime’s search for a job leads him to her more philanthropic niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), whose initial offer of work ends up as something far grander. Victoria’s global search for a magic, powerful scarab has finally ended in success but wary of what she might do with such a thing, Jenny steals it and when cornered, hands it to Jaime for safekeeping. To no one’s surprise the scarab is soon let loose and, in a scene that can best be described as Cronenberg body horror by way of Nickelodeon, attaches itself to Jaime, turning him into the Blue Beetle.
It’s close to impossible to view one of these movies at this stage without getting close to constant reminders of what’s come before and Blue Beetle often feels like the result of throwing Spider-Man and Iron Man into Jeff Goldblum’s machine in The Fly (with one particular scene that shamelessly riffs on Black Panther). The action sequences, some fittingly grand yet others marred by distractingly shoddy effects, often feel like old B-roll footage, the sight of two giant metallic creatures smashing each other causing overwhelming deja vu. It works best when a personality of its own is able to crawl through, in the cultural specifics of the family, brought to the screen with warmth and a host of references directly intended for a Latino audience (from Mexican superhero parody El Chapulín Colorado to multiple telenovelas) by writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and director Ángel Manuel Soto. The central family dynamic is prioritised over any romance and while it means certain characters are left a tad underserved, it does allow for Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza to have fun as an abuela with a revolutionary past.
Yet the fun promised by Sarandon’s snarling power suit-wearing villain (referred to as “Cruella Kardashian” at one point) is in frustratingly short supply, the actor all eye-shadowed up and ready to give meme but left wanting by a script that too often goes for perfunctory when more punch would do (George Lopez as a conspiracy theorist uncle is also left in search of funnier lines as comic support).
Fatigue from oversaturation is hard to ignore in another year of so, so many offerings (it’s only been the maximalist ingenuity of Across the Spider-Verse that’s really broken through) and Blue Beetle is too by-the-book for us to stop truly wondering why we’re still telling the same old story. But there’s a perkiness that’s hard to resist and a base-level competency that’s hard not to appreciate, a small beam of blue light in an otherwise dark time for superheroes.
Blue Beetle is in cinemas on 18 August
