“Blue Beetle” superbly blends action and fun

Full disclosure: based on the first trailer alone, Blue Beetle was the first DCU feature film I got excited about since Wonder Woman. I had not expected to be that interested until I learned which Blue Beetle the story would follow, and the highlights in that trailer made me eager to see the movie.

I was not disappointed.

Jaime Reyes is the first member of his family to graduate from college, and the joy of his return home to Palmera City is tempered by the series of bad news his family finally lets him know about: his father has serious health problems, the family auto shop had been shut down, and soon, the megacorp Kord Industries will be taking possession of the family home to demolish it and make room for more skyscrapers while pushing out the small community of families.

Jennifer Kord also returns home to challenge her great-aunt Victoria’s leadership and the direction she’s been leading Kord Industries in ever since Jenny’s father, Ted Kord, vanished years earlier. Victoria’s obsession with finding the Scarab and using its power to fuel similar tech that’s the heart of her new OMAC units is beyond power-hungry, it’s near manic. Her desire to sell this technology to the military and expand Kord Industries’ power base drives this, but we only get a hint as to why: she’s always been bitter at being passed over when her father handed the reins of the company over to Ted rather than her.

Jaime and Jenny cross paths during an ill-fated moment where he and his sister Milagro are summarily fired from their cleaning staff jobs at a Kord mansion, and Jenny’s offer to talk to him at Kord headquarters the next day changes the fates of everyone.

Jenny discovers that Victoria has found the Scarab after years of searching (it’s not clear if her father Ted or her grandfather hid it), and steals it to prevent her from unlocking its technology. After entrusting it to Jaime for safekeeping, it unexpectedly reacts, waking up and bonding with him, slowly turning Jaime into a symbiotic host for its sentient technology.

While still learning what he and the Scarab can do, Jenny takes Jaime back to a Kord office to retrieve a watch that contains a key to a secret lab her where father worked, deep below the old estate where she grew up. While escaping, Jenny and Jaime are spotted by Victoria, who sends Carapax (Victoria’s pet cyborg experiment and OMAC prototype) after them, and the ensuing fight between he and Jaime becomes a revelation after the Scarab activates again and helps Jaime defeat Carapax in battle. Victoria seems less interested in Carapax’s near-fatal encounter and more interested in seeing what someone can do with the Scarab attached to them.

While Jenny, Jaime and Uncle Rudy are reactivating Ted’s old lab to learn more about the Scarab and find out if there’s a way to disengage it from Jaime, Victoria and Carapax seek out Jaime at home to take the Scarab back, and inflict a lot of damage on Jaime’s family and neighborhood in the process. Jaime makes it back to battle Carapax again, but seeing his father having a heart attack while protecting the rest of the family distracts him long enough to be disabled and captured by Carapax and Victoria, who take him away while the Reyes family house burns.

The Reyes family remains steadfast in finding Jaime to rescue him, despite the pain of a fresh loss, and Jenny joins them to go get the hardware from Ted’s lab necessary to mount the rescue, including Uncle Rudy restoring the flying Bug ship to operational status. The rest of the story is about Jaime coming into his own as the fully integrated new Blue Beetle, using everything he is and can be to thwart Victoria’s plans.

This movie is full of love and fun from start to finish, and it balances the action and peril with the humor and comedic segments extremely well. It feels like a well-thought-out choice to present an emphasis on “family” for the main characters, and we see how important Jaime’s family is to him and to each other, which counters Jennifer’s apparent pain at not growing up with a family connection that strong, or at all.

Connecting Jaime’s Blue Beetle with the Beetle from DC Comics’ past was a tiny wink that most might miss the first time around, when Jenny tells the story of how the Scarab came into her father’s possession. Finding out Uncle Rudy’s skill with electronics and computers fits with how he’s tricked out “Taco”, his beloved Toyota Tacoma pickup truck, and hearing him retell tales of the heroic Blue Beetle that was around when he was a kid, dropping mentions of Metropolis and Star City, comparing their superheroes to the Beetle of Palmera City (and for additional reference Jaime graduated from Gotham City University) completes that link with the past.

Learning little things about the sentience in the Scarab is fun. It takes a while for Jaime to learn that the voice he hears is one only he can hear, and that it’s name is Khaji-Da. It started out trying to do everything for him, including deciding to kill when Jaime does not want to, but as the two consciousnesses begin to meld into a deeper and deeper connection, we can see hints that she is learning as much from Jaime as he is learning from her.

Discovering Carapax’s haunted past and long history with Victoria Kord adds another level of connection, albeit a darker one, and allows the audience the space for empathy once Khaji-Da shares what she learned about his past with Jaime. The turnabout in attitude between Khaji-Da and Jaime about being or not being a killer is especially poignant, and completes the full merging with Jaime. Also, hearing her speak Spanish with him now and then just like he does with his family adds to the appreciation of how much she is able and willing to learn about Jaime and his culture in order to make him a better host for the Scarab, and thus a better hero.

While the movie is long enough, and rightly focuses on Jaime’s growth into Blue Beetle, I hope there are extras on the eventual Blu-ray or 4K disc that go deeper into Victoria’s motivations and decisions to guide Kord Industries into being a full weapons of mass destruction developer other than simply wanting to destroy the threads of Ted’s legacy of humanitarian development out of spite.

As a side note, I did sit through all the credits to see what bonus scenes or Easter Eggs might be hidden there, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jon Valera was the stunt coordinator, who might be better known for his fight choreography in the John Wick movies. That’s the kind of bonus that makes me smile.

Possible minor spoiler: the mid-credits scene is intriguing and a little magical. The audience I was with began applauding once the secret was revealed. It opens up a door to a wider universe for our hero, and makes me excited to learn when we should expect to see Blue Beetle 2.

Go see this one in theaters when you can. The space of the bigger screen benefits the effects and the fights scenes.

Four out of five stars

Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero BLUE BEETLE.

Starring: Xolo Maridueña, Adriana Barraza, Damían Alcázar, Elpidia Carrillo, Bruna Marquezine, Raoul Max Trujillo, Susan Sarandon, and George Lopez, with Belissa Escobedo and Harvey Guillén
Director: Angel Manuel Soto
Screenplay by: Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer
Based on characters from DC Comics