I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadful Ant-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them. 

Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it. 

Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting. 

With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond