Blue Bee­tle review – a fair­ly decent time at the movies

There’s a bit at the end of 1997’s The Matrix where Neo attains God Genius sta­tus and is able to see the bina­ry code inside the malev­o­lent machine that he and his help­meets have been elbow fight­ing against. By the same stan­dard, we’ve now reached the point in the super­hero movie fatigue cycle where we are able to see all the con­stituent parts of the film and how they fit together.

And they are very much all present and cor­rect in Ángel Manuel Soto’s fit­ful­ly charm­ing, if depress­ing­ly famil­iar DC prop­er­ty, Blue Bee­tle. It takes all of three min­utes for the thought to occur, ​“Oh, so we’re doing this one again are we?”

It’s yet anoth­er power/​responsibility ori­gin sto­ry in which a plucky dweeb who looks kin­da hot in a cer­tain light (Xolo Maridueña’s Jaime Reyes) is french-kissed by some ancient alien tech­nol­o­gy in the shape of a scarab and is soon being heat-meld­ed togeth­er with some kick-ass insec­toid body armour which enables him to admin­is­ter pain in sev­en ways from Sun­day. Out to retrieve her spoils is a pow­er-suit­ed pan­tomime Susan Saran­don as evil cap­tain of pri­vate indus­try Vic­to­ria Kord who needs the tech for her pri­vate army of blast-hap­py mech cops.

This real­ly does play out beat-for-beat by the man­u­al, almost to the point of par­o­dy. It’s not that Soto has no moves in his arse­nal when it comes to achiev­ing a mere mod­icum of orig­i­nal­i­ty, it’s that the for­mal struc­ture of these films is now so tired and drea­ry that, even with a few, nifty cus­tomis­able ele­ments, every­thing looks and feels like a rehash of some­thing else. Indeed, you could like­ly come up with a fair­ly sta­ble chem­i­cal for­mu­la for the film’s genet­ic make-up, a dash of Ant-Man, a pinch of Spi­der-man, a soupçon on Shaz­am!, etc, etc… More amus­ing­ly, there are points that remind­ed me of some more alt/​weird com­ic capers, like 1994’s The Mask 1990’s Darkman.

Yet despite every­thing, Blue Bee­tle still offers up a fair­ly decent time at the movies, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its full-throat­ed and endear­ing­ly brash cel­e­bra­tion of Lati­no cul­ture and nos­tal­gia. It ref­er­ences every­thing from telen­ovel­las and kids car­toons, to supe­ri­or His­pan­ic cov­ers of Eng­lish lan­guage pop songs and the old ​“Luchador” wrestling films from the 1950s. In fact, every­thing that Soto and his writer Gareth Dun­net-Alco­cer do to devi­ate from the beat­en path real­ly stands out, not least the film’s sin­cere focus on the impor­tance of fam­i­ly rit­u­al in which the mak­ers actu­al­ly allow the fam­i­ly to fea­ture promi­nent­ly in the film.

Also, the film does more than it per­haps needs to when it comes to flesh­ing out the sociopo­lit­i­cal back­ground of the Reyes clan. Ini­tial­ly, Jaime comes home to dis­cov­er that rent hikes have led to his par­ents to lose their house and autoshop, yet soon dis­cov­ers that all work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties are being cleared out by cor­po­rate inter­ests who want to fire up dis­gust­ing flouro sky­scrap­ers on the land. In the back­ground is the dod­dery seam­stress Nana (Adri­ana Bar­raza) who hasn’t for­got­ten the gueril­la tac­tics of her for­ma­tive years fight­ing against unnamed impe­ri­al­ist scum.

All these details actu­al­ly feed into the sto­ry­line rather than exist as lit­tle bits of ref­er­en­tial flot­sam that can be checked off a list. The cli­mac­tic raid on an off-shore fortress works because it’s not the omnipo­tent hero forced to save his fam­i­ly, but the oth­er way around. Plus, there are a cou­ple of real­ly good lines (“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it!” yells crusty tech whizz Uncle Rudy, game­ly played by George Lopez), and lots of neat retro gad­gets, includ­ing a retooled Nin­ten­do Pow­er Glove, care of rebel­lious heiress, Jen­ny Kord (Bruna Marquezine).

It’s got a cou­ple of fun action sequences and doesn’t push for any­thing too cre­ative when it comes to the CGI (blue blasts, explod­ing walls and a split-down-the-mid­dle com­muter bus are the lim­it), which means there’s noth­ing mas­sive­ly off­putting from an aes­thet­ic van­tage, Which is rare for these films. And it wraps things up with no oblique ref­er­ences to oth­er super­hero fran­chis­es, and no obvi­ous path towards a sequel. So that already makes it a cut above the major­i­ty of its rivals.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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