128 min | PG-13 | August 18, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A college graduate comes home to a family that is losing its house and finds an alien scarab that turns him into a superhero he never asked to be. The powers are standard issue. The family is the whole movie.
Jaime Reyes graduates college and comes home to a working-class Mexican-American family in Palmera City. There is no job waiting and no money to save the house. He stumbles into possession of an alien scarab that fuses to his spine and turns him into an armored weapon. Ángel Manuel Soto builds his superhero movie around the family that surrounds the kid rather than the powers grafted onto him. The film is about a household that refuses to let one of its own carry the burden alone.
Xolo Maridueña plays Jaime as an overwhelmed young man who never asked for any of this. He registers the terror of the scarab bonding to his body before he registers the thrill, and that order matters. George López plays Uncle Rudy with conspiracy-minded paranoia that the film treats as earned rather than comic. Adriana Barraza plays Nana Reyes and turns a single scene with a heavy weapon into the movie’s best moment. Susan Sarandon plays Victoria Kord as a corporate villain who weaponizes immigrant labor without a flicker of doubt, and Sarandon refuses to make her interesting in any way that softens the cruelty.
Soto and writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer ground the spectacle in a specific cultural texture. The Reyes home is lit warm and shot tight, full of plastic-covered furniture and family photos, and the camera lingers there longer than the genre usually allows. The scarab armor manifests in chrome blue with weapons that assemble from Jaime’s imagination, and the design reads clean against the synth-heavy score that nods to the character’s Latino roots. The action itself defaults to the same weightless CGI that fills every film of this kind. The interiors feel real and the battles feel rendered.
Blue Beetle works best when it stays inside the Reyes living room and worst when it follows the formula into the third-act sky battle. The origin beats arrive exactly when you expect them. The family does not. Soto cannot escape the machinery of the genre, but he finds room inside it for a story about people who show up for each other when the system will not.