Review of Blue Beetle, directed by Angel Manuel Soto

I’m going to admit: I don’t care for superhero movies. Sure, they can be a lot of fun and be great to watch with an audience that’s weirdly devoted to these kinds of movies, but if I see that there’s going to be a superhero movie at my local AMC, the odds of me going and booking a ticket are very low.

I simply do not care enough to even attempt dragging myself to a theater because I know this simply isn’t my niche. I don’t care for Marvel or DC, which leads me to not get a ton of cultural references—although I am painfully aware of the tropes that end up manifesting in these kinds of stories.

I was seeing how people were raving about Blue Beetle on Reddit, and then my sister, who also has an AMC subscription, asked if I would see it with her. That was how we ended up at AMC on a random Sunday night watching this movie, and then we were massively complaining afterward about the people who were in the movie theater with us.

There was an entire family to our right, and they had a small boy who would not stop talking. When they would try to feebly discipline him and say stop talking, he would start talking louder. It was an entire time, and it became annoying the longer it went on—he did eventually stop talking though.

Let’s discuss the movie now!

When Jaime Reyes becomes infused with the Scarab and gains powers, it leads him—and his family—to fight against billionaires.

So the protagonist of this movie is Jaime Reyes, who is returning home from college after graduating with a pre-law degree from a university in Gotham. He has returned to his multigenerational family that lives in a neighborhood deeply affected by gentrification, and they’re debating how to break it to him that they’re going to lose the house because of everything going on.

But because Jaime also does not have a job, his sister helps land him a job at a mansion, where he snoops on a conversation between Victoria, the current head of Kord Industries, and Jenny.

There’s quite a bit of tension between the two, but when Jaime and his sister are caught in the house, they’re fired on the spot by Victoria. Jenny promises Jaime a job, and the next day, he ends up heading to Kord Industries to try and see if she’s going to keep that promise.

But Jenny has snuck into the lab and steals the Scarab, which was mined in the opening scene, because she knows that her aunt Victoria is going to use the Scarab for military intervention and basically screwing up the world.

Jenny puts it in a fast food container and gives it to Jaime, and when he returns home with it, his family bullies him into opening the container. They don’t listen to the warning to not touch the Scarab, and when it lands into Jaime’s hands, it fuses into him, giving him superhero powers, and he isn’t able to control them in the scene that comes after this.

So once he’s back to normal, he seeks out Jenny to ask what the heck just happened, but Jenny is being hunted by Victoria’s men.

So when the family brings Jenny into their fold, what ends up happening is that Jaime, Jenny, and his uncle Rudy, they broke into the HQ of Kord after finding out the Scarab is a weapon and they have no idea how to get it out of him.

They steal something from the building that once belonged to her father, and they barely manage to escape her uncle’s bodyguard. The trio ventures to Jenny’s father’s old home, that is now abandoned, where they learn that they cannot get it out of Jaime unless he dies.

At the same time, the family’s home is attacked by Victoria’s men. It catches on fire and Jaime comes to the rescue, but he is eventually caught by Victoria and kidnapped for experimentation.

His father dies as he’s being taken away, and the grieving family and Jenny decides to rescue Jaime from the clutches of evil. So with Victoria’s people and Jaime, the life force is being seeped out of him, as Victoria wants to use the Scarab’s energy to build an army.

Using Jenny’s father’s DIY weapons, Jaime’s family breaks into the compound he’s being held in. As Jaime has a vision with his dead father and wakes up in reality, still alive, he breaks free.

But Victoria’s bodyguard ends up having his energy and can evolve into a greater form, and he’s willing to kill anyone who gets in her path. When Sanchez lets Jaime free, he ends up being killed, and the family ends up having to race out there.

In one final epic battle with the bodyguard, it ends when the bodyguard realizes he, too, was a victim of Kord and takes Victoria out with him.

The family decides to start over with Jenny’s help, and, in the mid-credits scene, it’s revealed that Jenny’s father is still alive.

Overall Thoughts

I think Blue Beetle could’ve been a great movie, but it lacked a ton of necessary elements to make it an awesome superhero movie.

My sister complained about how the love between Jenny and Jaime was nonexistent and that they had no chemistry at all, but our common complaint was that a lot of the information presented in the movie is just kind of thrown at you.

There’s no explaining or backstory throughout the movie, and it kind of forces you to just go along with what’s happening. Which simply didn’t work. The movie was funny, though, and I enjoyed how it ended up incorporating Latinx culture in a way that seemed more genuine than just for show.

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