Blue Beetle Review

Structurally there is nothing here you have not seen: a young man gets a suit he cannot control, a corporate villain wants it back, a mentor dies, a final fight happens on a floating platform. What makes it watchable is that the Reyes family are not the standard set of worried relatives waiting at home. Damián Alcázar and Adriana Barraza give the film its gravity, George Lopez's conspiracy minded uncle is funny without being the comic relief switch, and the house itself, its mortgage, its gentrifying neighbourhood, its threatened eviction, is a real subject the script keeps returning to.

Xolo Maridueña is likeable and slightly overpowered by the ensemble around him. The failures are the budget and the antagonist. Susan Sarandon plays a weapons executive who might as well be reading her lines off the wall, Raoul Max Trujillo's armoured enforcer is a shape, and the action is dark, weightless and cut so tightly that the Beetle's design never gets a good look. Pleasant, minor, and released into an audience that had stopped caring.