Blue Beetle review – perky superhero caper offers more of the same
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 both 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. Gentri