'Blue Beetle' and the one easy way to tell whether your superhero movie sucks.

Does your superhero movie pass "The Mancini Test?" 'Blue Beetle' did not.

Warner Bros

Modern superhero movies always seem to have just enough of a political sheen and a whiff of representational pioneering to support any number of try-hard thinkpieces; I think they’re designed this way. The thinkpiece industry is as tied to tentpole releases as are the movie studios, so it really doesn’t take much. These are people used to having to squint hard to find meaning.

Mostly this dance seems a way to disguise the basic nature of IP-driven* superhero content as anything other than one of our most cynically commercial and brutally derivative genres. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to occasionally enjoy cynically commercial and brutally derivative art, or that you’re an idiot for loving it every now and then, but I doubt that enjoyment comes down to whether that movie has “good politics” or marks some symbolic achievement in representation. (Why did I like the movie? Well, probably because it was the fourth-biggest global debut ever for an action-comedy toplined by an Asian-American female over 25.)

All of which brings us to Blue Beetle, a Latin American-themed superhero origin story from DC comics. The historical background for this is that in 2006, writers Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner redefined Blue Beetle, a DC character who had originally been created in 1939 by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, as a Mexican-American kid. This new movie version starring Xolo** Maridueña from Cobra Kai and directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) packs a boatload of sly references to School of the Americas, colonialism, the US meddling in Latin American coups, and a mostly Latino supporting cast, but I doubt that was why my 10-year-old stepson and his friend who I took to the screening with me loved it. It certainly wasn’t why it fell flat for me — I would’ve loved to praise a superhero movie that worked in a villain backstory about US-trained death squads in Central America.

Putting all the potential thinkpiece fodder aside, I’ve realized that a lot of my potential enjoyment of superhero movies comes down to one basic question: can I tell what’s going on during the action sequences? This is my new Bechdel Test for superhero movies. Call it the Mancini Test.

I realize putting things so bluntly doesn’t make for an exciting Freudian close-read — following the bread crumbs, teasing out meaning from muttered asides, trying to assign a coherent political ideology to the Frankenstein’s monster of mid-century pulp tropes these movies usually are — but it’s true. I like dopey movies much better when I can tell what’s happening. That’s probably the sole reason I enjoyed The Flash.

In Blue Beetle, whose action scenes virtually all take place at night and/or in shadowy corridors and murky lairs, I couldn’t tell what was happening. It was mostly a lot of thumps and blurs juxtaposed with reaction shots. And so the scenes that were intended to be the exciting parts were actually boring. Even if Blue Beetle had otherwise been a rousing call for worldwide socialist revolution (it isn’t) I probably still wouldn’t have enjoyed it, for the simple equation that ambiguous action = boring action = boring movie.***

That’s the basic gist of it, but if we want to get more specific, Blue Beetle is mostly a Flamin Hot-like exercise in taking a very familiar story and adding a dusting of Latin character. In this case, that means that our hero, Jaime Reyes, is a Mexican-American kid returning home after graduating college worried that he’s achieved nothing but to drive his family deeper into debt (I’m over 40 and still have student loan debt, so I understand). He has a glib sister (Belissa Escobedo), a doting mother (Elpidia Carrillo), a father who’s just had heart attack (Damian Alcazar), and a nana (Adriana Barraza) who won’t be important until the third act. He also has a loud uncle played by George Lopez, who drives a tricked out Tacoma with a roll bar and a Cucaracha horn, which he calls “The Taco.” Later on he makes a security camera-jamming device in his garage that he calls “El Chapulín”****.

I grew up loving George Lopez, whose references always felt especially relevant if you grew up in the rural Central Valley like me, but his character, like most of the characters in Blue Beetle, don’t really feel like integrated people so much as composites of references and whatever qualities were most convenient for the plot. Lopez’s trailer line, “Batman was a fascist!” (which DC fans were apparently mad about, hilariously) comes in the midst of his character delivering a brief history of the Blue Beetle character and the rest of the DC universe. “Uncle Rudy” is something of a superhero fanboy, it seems, which is a character these movies always have to have now, usually in order to explain to the audience the complicated history of these characters and how they fit into the equally complex expanded comics movie universe. Why the fanboy character should be Uncle Rudy, or why he makes security jamming devices in his garage, or what any of it has to do with his general vato-ness, is unclear. It just seems like they were easy shortcuts.

Nana is much the same way, remaining mostly mute and unnecessary as a character until she busts out a mini-gun in the last act, screaming “Die imperialist bastards” while she mows down dark hallways full of henchmen — thus revealing some sort of vague backstory as a former revolutionary (the movie never has the balls to say exactly who she was fighting with or against). My 10-year-old screening companions loved it, but after you’ve been exposed to decades of rappin’ granny jokes, the idea of a grandparent doing something cool as a big reveal sort of loses its novelty.

Anyway, forced into a demeaning hotel job, Jaime propitiously meets a rich girl, Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), heiress to a Tony Stark-like defense contracting empire, and the do-gooder feuding for control of the company with her more bellicose, Machiavellian aunt played by Susan Sarandon. Jenny tries to hide her special Blue Beetle armor with Jaime, but wouldn’t you know it, it fuses to his body. The armor suit is halfway between robotic armor and an alien entity, meaning it “chose” Jaime, in a perfect plot mash-up of Iron Man, Shazam, Spider-Man, and Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man. (Shazam is far and away the best and sweetest of these movies if you’re looking for an actually good one to watch with your family).

Jaime has to figure out how to use it before Susan Sarandon and her army of henchman can steal it back from him (which will kill him) and in the process help the good defense contractor heiress take back her company from the evil defense contractor heiress. How does he do it? With a little help from his family, of course.

Minus the truck called The Taco and the vague allusions to death squads, you’ve seen this movie before, assuming you’ve seen more than one superhero movie in the last ten years. Ángel Manuel Soto seems to know this and admirably attempts not to waste much of our time repeating it, speed running through plot points and yadda yadda-ing his way through requisite exposition when he even bothers with it at all.

That makes sense as a strategy, but if you’re not going to take some joy in the action set pieces, why are we here? I thought that was part of the tacit agreement we make when we buy a ticket to a superhero movie in 2023 — yes, the plot will by derivative and the characters utilitarian, and there will at least 5-10 minutes dedicated to teasing future superhero movies barely related to this one, but in exchange there will be enough eye candy to keep you from getting too bored. Well, folks, I was bored.

Blue Beetle fails at eye candy and the story is strictly paint-by-numbers, leaving little else beyond the dusting of Latin flavor. It’s like a cup full of drywall insulation covered with Tajín and Chamoy.

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*My dad asked me what this meant last week. Basically, IP is “intellectual property,” so any movies based on existing things a studio owns the rights to, like superhero comics, dolls, board games, or older movies, plays, books, or TV shows. So any movies based on those kinds of things, as most big movies are nowadays, are “IP-driven.”

**SHOW-low.

***There are a couple superhero movies I can think of that were so otherwise well-built that I could overlook badly-filmed action sequences. Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie, Batman Begins, comes to mind (people forget how much Nolan loved shaky cam before he evolved into the IMAX guy), and probably the first Black Panther (with action not nearly as bad as Batman Begins, but not great either).

****Probably a reference to a superhero parody from the 70s (El Chapulín Colorado), though it also just means “grasshopper,” which are also commonly eaten in Mexico, so between “the taco” and “the grasshopper” it’s possible they just got all their nicknames from skim-reading a Mexican restaurant menu.

Other Notes

Remember when I was talking about the tiered system of press screenings? They did that with this one, sort of. The big Blue Beetle review round-up posts (here and here) all dropped Wednesday afternoon, and when I checked my own press screening invite (received through the Bay Area PR reps), it wasn’t until later that night.

My cursory research on the critics quoted revealed that they were all based in LA, New York, or Chicago, as far as I could tell (there is a San Francisco Chronicle review quoted in those round ups, but it came from an LA-based critic). Critics in those markets getting dibs before anyone else isn’t as transparent as when the studios give the junketeers and some hand-picked outlets preferred access, but it’s still a tiered system, and the first wave of reviews did seem to be more positive than the next one.

Whether that’s because those big market critics have closer relationships to the studios and more access to lose from a negative review, or simply because they actually saw it on properly calibrated screens, is all speculation. But it is still kind of weird that they don’t show it to everyone at the same time, isn’t it? Studios definitely aren’t doing this by accident.