Blue Beetle (2023)

Blue Beetle arrives as the fourteenth installment of a franchise already shuffling toward its own funeral, and it carries itself with the earnest bearing of a film that knows it will be remembered for something other than its grosses. Ángel Manuel Soto directs Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, a law graduate who returns to a working-class neighborhood, finds his family facing eviction, and winds up bonded to an alien Scarab. The cast is almost entirely Latino, the dialogue slips between English and Spanish without apology, and the cultural texture is offered as the point rather than the garnish. It is the first live-action superhero picture with a Latino lead, and it never lets us forget the weight of that fact, though it wears the weight lightly enough.

The politics are visible but mostly routed through the machinery of the genre. Kord Industries is a military contractor run by a CEO who displaces families, exploits her workers, and dreams of imperial projects abroad; Susan Sarandon has described her character as embodying imperialism in the name of democracy. The film gestures at the School of the Americas and American intervention in Latin America as villain backstory, and Jaime's neighborhood sits under the threat of gentrification. This is anti-corporate sentiment delivered with a punch and a joke, not a pamphlet.

What the film declines to do is instructive. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental sermon, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent character. Women hold power (a ruthless CEO, a capable heiress, a grandmother with a revolutionary past) but gender is not the film's argument. The messaging that does exist arrives through family comedy and armored fistfights, which keeps the sermonizing at a tolerable volume. The result is a superhero film that is culturally specific, politically pointed, and ultimately more interested in a family's grief and resilience than in converting anyone. A respectable vintage, if not a memorable one.