Good news. You have lived long enough to hear Susan Sarandon yell “Carapax, ready the claw” while dangling from a digitally enhanced helicopter. She did first gain prominence shrieking in The Rocky Horror Picture Show but this is not how we expected the most earnest of actors to enter her golden years.
Sarandon is, sad to say, not the best thing in a film that only occasionally rises above the anarchic mediocrity we expect from the DC Extended Universe. Wave goodbye to all that. In a statement that might confuse even regular readers of Wittgenstein, James Gunn, chief of the studio, explained that, although Blue Beetle – a crime fighter you’re surely all familiar with – is the first character in his rebooted DC Universe (farewell “extended”), the first DCU film will be his own Superman: Legacy, in 2025.
All clear? We’ll continue. The old regime ends with an undeniable oddity. Over the past few weeks, a sense has emerged that DC is attempting to sell Blue Beetle (you know, Blue Beetle, you must have heard of him) as a Latino equivalent of Black Panther. It seems unlikely the obscure superhero will have that impact but the most enjoyable material here does centre on the character’s background in a fictional southern United States city.
Xolo Maridueña, best known for Netflix’s Cobra Kai, stars as Jaime, a recent college graduate who returns home to find his family dealing with economic hardship. Upon encountering Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), a younger, more morally upright member of a rapacious dynasty, he accepts her offer of a job, but before they have time to formalise the arrangement she hands him a throbbing blue scarab and asks him to hide it while she evades enemies within the corporation.
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You know how this goes. You’ve seen a million of these things. Our hitherto ordinary hero gets a little too close to Beetlus MacGuffinus and finds himself suddenly possessed of unimaginable powers. He can fly. He has mighty strength. He can digest dung. (No, no, we made that last one up but the DCU can happily use that if the character really does make it into a sequel.)
The family is presented in the manner of a broad sitcom. Dad (Damián Alcázar) is solid and honourable. The grandma (Adriana Barraza) is a lovable old curmudgeon. The popular comic George Lopez gets to play a mad uncle with a gift for manipulating machinery. As Sarandon’s evil magnate plots to remove the now integrated scarab from the Beetle/Jamie symbiosis, our amiable clan come together in tolerably amusing kick-ass fashion.
Floods of Latino pop-cultural references – music, food, TV shows – help bed the film down in its underrepresented milieu. A late attempt to address the often grim political history of Latin America feels a tad inappropriate in this largely frivolous entertainment but Ángel Manuel Soto, director of the admired Charm City Kings, can congratulate himself on bringing freshness to an often turgid genre.
The problems are, alas, all the usual ones. Whereas Jaime may come from a different place from most heroes of superhero flicks, nothing sets the Blue Beetle itself apart from the dozens of competing magical brawlers we have endured over the past two decades. (Honestly, that dung thing is right there, guys.)
The least said about Sarandon’s off-the-peg villain the soonest mended. And, as ever, the final half-hour is an excruciatingly boring brawl in the sky where, because everything is possible, nothing is remotely surprising. This is what most dragged down DC’s Black Adam, The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Perhaps Gunn’s reimagining will spread invention and excitement throughout the universe. One has to be hopeful. This can’t go on forever.
Blue Beetle is in cinemas from Friday, August 18th
