Growing up is hard, growing up in an immigrant family is harder. You keep your head down, get through school, go to college, come home with six figures of debt and another three years of law school and a doubling of your debt on the docket. And in the meantime, you work at a resort because your father had a heart attack and can’t work and your rent is being tripled because your neighborhood is being gentrified. And then you get fired because you stuck up for a billionaire heiress who was being accosted by her billionaire aunt and the billionaire heiress tells you to come by the office the next day and then she gives you a beetle shaped alien artifact that bonds with you on a molecular level and the billionaire aunt wants to rip it out of you to turn it into a militarized exoskeleton. Fairly universal experience, I know. I certainly remember when I bonded with my alien exoskeleton. But even something as mundane as that can be a superhero origin story.
Now, it might be a bit of an odd one to talk about Blue Beetle in 2025, considering it’s dead franchise after the fall of the Snyderverse and the rise of the Gunnmosphere. But I still think there’s something worth talking about here and a movie worth watching. Because while the story itself may no longer be canon to DC’s cinematic universe and it’s a fairly derivative story, it’s told with the heart and enough relevance that make this a worthy reference point for the character moving forward.
Let’s start with the good. The eventual Blue Beetle is Jaime Reyes (that’s pronounced “hi me”, which will come up), played by Xolo Maridueña of Cobra Kai fame, and he’s surrounded by his family, most notably his sister Milagro, played by Belissa Escobedo (Happy’s Place, Hocus Pocus 2) and his crazy, conspiracy theorist uncle Rudy, played by George Lopez (George Lopez). Maridueña is just so likable; he’s optimistic, naive, he’s Miguel Diaz, Johnny Lawrence’s star student. You can’t not like him, so it doesn’t really matter that he’s wrapped up in all that Tom Holland Spider-Man energy. Rudy provides a lot of the comedy, even though it does at times feel like George Lopez is doing a character written for Jack Black, he manages the right level of kook and quirk to make Rudy a good addition to this movie. His conspiracy theories are off the wall and he does pipe in with lore dumps now and then, but it’s largely a pleasant experience. And his sister Milagro brings the snark and the social commentary (which can be a little heavy handed, especially in the first act, but it’s still effective enough at getting its point across). The rest of Jaime’s family is also great, but since they often act as a family unit, until the end of the movie they don’t really stand out from each other (but when they do, it’s pretty worth it). They feel like a fairly typical family too, stepping on each other’s sentences and generally being just annoying enough for you to believe that they’re really related, but not so much that you can’t stand them. It’s a tightrope walk, but Blue Beetle pulls it off pretty well, but just like real family members, sometimes you just want them to take a breath. Just for a moment. Maybe that’s just me?
They get to be real people too; perhaps not fully realized because it’s too many characters to focus on in one movie, but they feel real and “lived-in” when you see them interact with each other. The Reyes are a convincing family unit that shows off their generosity, even thought they’re in the middle of losing their home in the Edge Keys of the fictional Palmera City, Texas. And they face real issues, like hesitating to call the police because they don’t know what could happen when they show up. The characters are what drive this movie; if you don’t like them, then the flaws of this movie will easily overwhelm the things they did right. But, I think a lot of people will see themselves in the Reyes family and it really was very nice to see this kind of representation in a film of this magnitude. It didn’t just have a lot of Latin stars; the director, Angel Manuel Soto, is Puerto Rican and the writer, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is from Mexico. That’s that level of vertical integration that makes a movie feel authentic and keeps it from feeling like it’s pandering to an audience. You know, like the difference between BlacKkKlansman and Green Book.
It’s also refreshing to see a superhero who isn’t just another billionaire white dude. Look, I love Batman and Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark made me care about Iron Man for the first time in my life, but there’s more to being a hero than not having any of the normal struggles that people whose bank accounts have fewer than nine zeroes go through. It’s said that when Stan Lee was creating Spider-Man and Iron Man, he wanted to make the most relatable hero in our boy Pete and the least relatable hero in Stark, and, well, Iron Man’s still around so it’s proven to be a successful archetype. Jaime Reyes is very much more like Peter Parker and I think that will resonate with a lot of people even if they’re not in that early-20s age range. And, well, he’s just so damn likable, I mentioned that already.
Maridueña is star material and it’s kind of a shame that he has the indignity of being in a movie that was the worst box office premiere in the DCEU for a decade before it released in 2023. The movie was hit hard by superhero fatigue; people were already tired of the overstuffed genre and by the time the meant-for-streaming Blue Beetle came to theaters, no one really cared. The reviews were mostly positive, garnering a 78% RT score. It’s not a number that’s going to light the world on fire and I’ve mentioned the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes before, but it also managed a 90% audience score. And while I generally side more with critics, I think that speaks to the crowd-pleasing nature of the film. So while the movie seriously underperformed, none of that was down to Maridueña’s performance. He’s so good on screen; Jaime is charismatic, genuine, humble, everything you want in a protagonist and in a superhero. The kind of traits a symbiotic alien exoskeleton would look for when choosing a host—I just wish the movie touched on why it chose him instead of just that it chose him. The kid has qualities, that’s easy enough to see. But the movie strangely has no curiosity about why Jaime gets to bond with the Blue Beetle scarab over anyone else the scarab didn’t choose including the original Blue Beetle hero. It’s an odd choice to not even address it, to have no one even ask the question why. So while Maridueña puts in an admirable performance, the character doesn’t stand out enough to make him truly memorable. I have to imagine there’s a scene somewhere on the cutting room floor that for some reason just didn’t make it into the movie that would explain this a little. I saw Blue Beetle when it first hit streamers a year or so ago, but even that recently I couldn’t remember many salient details of the film. I had the tangible memory of having a fun time watching it, but no lines or scenes really embedded themselves into my brain the way, say, Captain America casually saying “On your left” to Sam Wilson in Winter Soldier or Michael Peña confirming with Paul Rudd that they’re the good guys in Ant-Man has. And of course nothing here can touch the “I am Iron Man” moment, which took years of building to get to, so it’s not like I expected that; but not one of the fights comes close to Cap v. Batroc. It’s actually a shame to have as physically gifted an actor as Maridueña and not let him show off some of those martial arts skills that makes the action in Cobra Kai so convincing. It doesn’t help that CGI is heavily relied on and more than a bit suspect in places, making it sometimes look like a big budget movie done cheaply, which perhaps betrays its made-for-streaming origins.
And now we really get to the not so good of Blue Beetle. Unfortunately, even more than most origin story films, there’s very, very little here that’s original. The movie skates by on the strength of the characters because some much of this film is cribbed from other movies, mostly MCU films. And I’m not just talking about story beats either, it’s full gags. When the scarab first bonds with Jaime, he flies up into the atmosphere and then comes back down through the roof, just like in Iron Man. The scarab itself bonds to Jaime very similarly to the Venom symbiote (except it also burns off all his clothes and shoes, making it the least practical suiting up I’ve ever seen; hard to pop out, do some life-saving, and then come back to work or whatever completely stark naked, not to mention the clothes budget skyrocketing). Then it wants to kill and talks to Jaime the way the Stark suit talks to Peter in Spider-Man: Homeward Bound (whichever the first one was) and it even has the ability to take total control of Jaime’s body like in Upgrade. Except this time it’s pop star Becky G (Power Rangers) as Khaji-da, the scarab, instead of Jennifer Connolly as Suit Lady Karen. The evil CEO wants to build a more evil version of the good thing, just like in Iron Man and Ant-Man. Almost scene to scene, you’ll recognize things you’ve seen in other superhero films. And there’s such an insistence on family togetherness and family is mentioned so many times that I expected Dominic Toretto to pop up just for a cameo. Like I said before, the fights aren’t all that memorable either; the scarab can create anything Jaime can imagine to fight with, like Green Lantern’s power ring.
But a lot of that turns out to be blaster arms and a Buster Sword; this isn’t to say that the writer isn’t imaginative, but rather it feels like the studio isn’t. I don’t mind that he conjured up a Buster Sword, I’d probably want one too because I spent all video game time as a kid trying to beat Sephiroth before homework time, but there’s nothing establishes Jaime as these interests. In fact, as endearing as he is, there isn’t a lot of character development. Jenny Kord, the good billionaire, played by Brazilian actress Bruna Marquezine, immediately trusts Jaime after one failed act of chivalry, entrusting him to secret away the scarab out of nowhere. Her aunt, Victoria Kord, played by Oscar winner and five time nominee Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking), is so cartoonishly evil it’s hardly believable and on top of that, she really goes out of her way to be slightly racist a lot. I mean, we probably all know people like that, but it just feels like too much. Yes, there are moments of unintended hilarity as an actress of her caliber says some of the lines she has to say, but that’s not enough to keep me from feeling like Victoria needs to be taken back to the drawing board. She already wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machine super soldiers, but she’s also a racist? And so is her receptionist? What was that interview process like? She’s so over the top, she’s one of the weakest parts of this film. The pacing is also a bit of an issue; at 2 hours and 7 minutes, it’s hardly a short movie, but because of the pacing, just a few too many things felt rushed, like the scarab handoff or the burgeoning romance between Jaime and Jenny, while many things that needed to be developed weren’t.
So what we end up with is a seriously flawed movie that has enough redeeming qualities to be both good enough fun to watch and serve as a strong character foundation for the Blue Beetle going forward, should James Gunn and DC decide the revisit the character—which I believe they should. With Gunn’s focus on heartfelt, joyful superheroing, Jaime Reyes and Xolo Maridueña deserve another shot. His whole family does, really. There are real characters here, real love being shown, real stories being told. They just need more time to tell them and more time to develop these characters who are instantly endearing, but largely unexplored. And there’s value here, both artistic and social; in 2025, the sight of a terrified Latin family being terrorized at gunpoint by masked paramilitary operatives with questionable legal authority and depraved morality isn’t just fiction anymore, it’s a reality all over the country. Blue Beetle intentionally tells the story of immigrants in America, documented and undocumented, and their struggle, in a real way despite the absolutely fantastical setting of having an alien beetle fuse itself to your spine. This kind of representation is getting harder to find and we need art that reflects society. And that includes big budget family films like Blue Beetle. James Gunn, Jake Schreier, and Matt Shakman proved with Superman, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps that just two years after superhero fatigue was at its peak, it’s not superheroes we were tired of. No, certainly not; we need heroes now more than ever, on-screen and off. We were tired of paint by numbers universe builders that didn’t differentiate themselves from what came before and only served to set up what comes next. Blue Beetle was a start for DC, and now James Gunn has taken the ball and run with it in earnest. But until we get to see Gunn’s take on the cerulean superhero, we can still go back and enjoy this flawed and fun film, streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! If you do like I do and use a movie to push through that turkey-borne post-meal malaise, Blue Beetle isn’t a bad choice for families with older kids, but I would once again remind you that The Paper Tigers, which I covered last week, is kind of a perfect family film. And because I believe in the rule of threes and linking to you to previous blog posts, I will once again offer Superman for your viewing pleasure. And remember, if you are celebrating this holiday, please do it safely. And save me a piece of pie.
