There’s a weird parallel in how Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle and its release at this point in the DCEU resembles its in-universe comic debut. See, this version of the character – there’s been three in the DC Universe – emerged in 2006 in the aftermath of Infinite Crisis, one of those line-wide big events and continuity shake-ups that attracted nerds looking to see superheroes fight each other and/or die, and repelled potential new readers because of how much legwork they required to understand even the most minor of details. Most people who didn’t live through World War II only knew of the character as the Ted Kord version, a benign inventor type perhaps best known to fans outside of Justice League International die-hards as being the inspiration for Nite-Owl II in Watchmen (at one point, he was Alan Moore’s intended character of use, back when the series was meant to use all of the characters from Charlton Comics, Blue Beetle’s original publisher, instead of stand-ins). However, in the lead-up to Infinite Crisis, Kord caught a trey-eight slug in the cranium, courtesy of Wonder Woman villain Maxwell Lord (who you may remember as a rare Pedro Pascal L in Wonder Woman 1984).
Enter Jaime Reyes, a Mexican-American teen who bonded with Kord’s alien artifact, the Scarab, which the inventor never could quite link up with but based all of his tech off of, and became a hybrid Iron Man (without all the money) and Spider-Man (without all of the writer-inflicted torment). He was one of the first characters introduced in this new multi-verse of 52 Earths and was one of the few with staying power: People liked Jaime, because readers didn’t give a fuck about a legacy character taking over for a character they didn’t care about in the first place and because he was genuinely charming in the way that the various teen heroes in the DCU often are.
To be clear, the comic-book world was in a much better place than the DCEU now: Infinite Crisis kicked off a few years of reasonably acclaimed runs, big events, and so on while witnessing the death throes of a modern superhero universe. The company’s been pathologically pilloried by some and belligerently beloved by others ever since Zack Snyder was handed the keys to the kingdom in 2013 and was full of the messy drama that Marvel always seemed to avoid in the modern era: stars behaving badly, executive fuckery, nightmarish corporate sales, etc. Their major successes in recent years have come from their properties that could stand independently (Wonder Woman, Aquaman) and creator-driven concepts designed to be fully removed from the universe (The Batman, The Suicide Squad/Peacemaker).
But pride always came before a fall, and 2023 has been a particularly epic one for them. First was Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which got punted out of 2022 once Warner Bros. realized they could only afford to release so many titles at the end of that year, choosing Don’t Worry Darling and Black Adam instead, hoping that star power could draw people to theaters like Dune did (it didn’t). No one was particularly surprised that it failed so miserably, to the point that the director cracked jokes on Reddit about how he got paid upfront, at least, and caused Zachary Levi to go on a months-long press tour to vent his personal frustration with the project. Then came The Flash, whose hype tour, after nine years of development hell and a miserable amount of controversy, somehow managed to fool a bunch of journalists into assuming that it would do well, and it flopped so hard that I was genuinely shocked that Barbie fully managed to annihilate it from the public perception of Warner Bros. in the Discovery merger era.
Blue Beetle isn’t the last movie in the DCEU – that honor will go to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom later this year – but it is the first with to introduce a new character who will, at least according to the producer himself, survive the transition to James Gunn’s reboot of the universe. This is inherently confusing, but it’s mainly just a matter of semantics: one look at Soto’s film, and you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a part of the universe in the first place. Soto’s set his film in Paloma City, one of those comic-world analogs meant to stand in for somewhere like Miami, and it is colorful, vibrant, and alive in narratively-justified ways that are antithetical to the blue-tinted grays of the Snyder era or the Piss Christ lenses used in The Flash. The same goes for the cast, which, in depicting the Reyes family, manages to create recognizable and empathetic personalities in a way that most superhero movies tend to avoid nowadays, embracing the kind of class issues that Marvel tends to eschew or just throw money at.
Jaime (Xolo Maridueña), a debt-ridden fresh college graduate, returns home to a gentrifying neighborhood, miserable employment opportunities, and a family stressed about having to move. The landlord’s raised the rent by 300 percent, and Dad (Damián Alcázar) had a heart attack that nobody told him about so that he wouldn’t worry while he was at school, so they had to close down the auto shop. His sister (Belissa Escobedo) can get him a job scraping gum off of tables at a palatial estate owned by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), which puts him in a strange position. He witnesses a fight between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over her attempts to rebrand her father’s company, Kord Industries, as an arms manufacturer. He intervenes, gets fired, and gets promptly potentially rehired by Jenny, who tells him to show up to corporate HQ downtown and that she’ll find him work.
When he does show up for their meeting, alarms start going off in the building, and a panicked Jenny hands him a cardboard burger box, telling him to flee and to not open the box. Once at the family home, his folks pressure him to open the box, and he finds a weird metal beetle inside it. This, of course, is the Scarab, which Jenny stole from Kord’s R&D department, knowing that they’d use it for something evil (and they are). But the poor kid makes the mistake of touching the device, and it integrates itself into his body, burning his clothes off and giving him a bizarre suit of techno-armor, as well as the ability to fly and generate a shitload of weapons out of his arms for any purpose.
The sequence in which Jaime bonds with the device – again, think Iron Man armor – is kid-friendly body horror like Star Kid back in the ’90s, albeit with a modern superheroic twist, and it’s when the movie really begins to kick into high gear. When he gets back from his high-flying and stressful adventures in the clouds and in the city (where he accidentally splits a city bus in half with a shield), he immediately passes the fuck out, naked, in front of his family. Upon waking up, he decides he’s gotta find Jenny and get to the bottom of all of this, which he does with the help of his paranoid inventor uncle Rudy (George Lopez). What he finds will let him in on the little legacy of that device and just who exactly Jenny’s dad was, and also put him in the eyes of Kord Industries and their enforcer Ignacio Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo, cutting a Bronson-like badass detachment), who want the Scarab to launch a line of One-Man Army Corps (OMAC) battle suits.
In Soto’s hands, what would become a genuinely generic superhero story – I’m sure you can identify at least ten different ways in which this resembles a Marvel property – becomes a swell tribute to Mexican-American culture which filters its way from the reference-heavy dialogue to the style of the fight scenes. Compared to some of the other bigger-budget and more outright-actiony superhero flicks, the scale is very small, but it’s made entertaining because of the way that Soto includes Lucha Libre-style moves into the character’s fighting style. It’s entertaining and kinetic in a way that the CG-heavy battles in these movies often aren’t, and the smaller scope of the film makes it refreshingly lower in stakes, allowing the characters to really shine through. What’s even better is how thoroughly the design ethos is justified through the film’s subject matter – there’s a reason that neon is splashed all over the poster and the title’s font is cut like a forgotten retrowave single – rather than it just being a matter of Taika Waititi thinking a style needing a shake-up, à la his Thor films.
Kord’s Blue Beetle was active in the ’80s and all of his tech was made then, so it makes sense that he’d take inspiration from contemporary consumer electronics and pop culture in making his weaponry. So when a character emerges sporting a chain gun that’s covered in Rubix Cube squares – also never acknowledged as such in dialogue – it becomes an endearing little sight gag rather than something that needs to be acknowledged directly. That said, if there are things holding Blue Beetle back, they’d be the length (at 127 minutes, it feels a little long in the tooth) and the reliance on making an audience give a damn about Ted Kord, who hangs over the film like a ghost.
But as far as it integrates with Gunn’s DCU, Soto’s work here is weirdly apace with The Suicide Squad, though it is intended for a much younger audience, being Corman’s New World Pictures to Gunn’s Troma. They relish in these characters’ oddity and comic-book nature, unafraid of audience laughter, given that it’s part of the point. What’s even more fascinating is how they both share a perspective on American imperialism, with The Suicide Squad depicting its practice through its “Let’s send the mercenaries in to do our dirty work down in South America” and Blue Beetle drawing on its lengthy after-effects. Both are tied up in the mess of global capitalism and “spheres of influence,” and hit surprisingly hard in their own ways, with Soto straight-up lifting imagery from the MCU in order to hammer home the point during a pivotal reveal, altering the perspective to show the ugliness of corporatist warfare, much in the same way that Gunn did (albeit in a less blackly-comic fashion).
While the new heads over at DC have stated that everything’s getting thrown out the window come Superman: Legacy time, it’s hard not to wonder whether or not this approach is a preview of coming attractions and whether Blue Beetle might ultimately be more influential on long-term trends than it might seem with an August release date and a comparative lack of a push as The Flash had. But what’s certain is that it’s the best film DC’s released since The Batman, and possibly one that may give them what they’ve long hoped for out of the recent slate of in-universe pictures: a bonafide organic hit that punches at Marvel’s weight.