Starring Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine, George Lopez, Belissa Escobedo, Raoul Trujillo, Harvey Guillen, Damián Alcázar. Susan Sarandon

Directed by Angel Manuel Soto

Warner Bros., out now

Jaime Reyes’ life is turned upside down when he is entrusted with a mysterious artefact that grants him superpowers, turning him and his family into targets of the sinister Kord Corporation.

I went into this one entirely cold, knowing nothing about either the film itself or the character and his background in the comics, so anyone looking for a detailed analysis of how true this is to the existing comic book canon should likely look elsewhere. I’ve honestly not stopped thinking about it since the final credits sting (yup, stay to the very end of this one if you’re interested in that sort of thing, kids) and even now, a full twelve hours later, I feel somewhat torn on the whole thing.

Let’s start with the positives. This is a film with a lot of representation of Hispanic culture on screen. People often speak in their native language, subtitled, and there’s a lot of little moments in amongst the over-the-top action which drive home core values of family, love and hope against adversity. It’s certainly picked a lane, and is arguably one of the more explicitly political of the DC movies, forgoing metaphor or analogy for straight up commentary on the iniquities of life in the United States for Mexicans and, by extension, other immigrants. Removed from the real world it may be (no Donald Trump here) but it does a good job of getting that message across.

It’s also an order of magnitude prettier than early trailers may have suggested. Whether comments about the unfinished looking CGI in the recent Flash movie prompted a re-do of this or not is up for debate, but certainly the CGI and FX work on display here looks better then early shots would have you believe.

And the cast are (mostly) decent. Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña is likeable enough as protagonist Jaime, and does his best with a script which has a lot of holes in it. George Lopez steals pretty much every scene in which he appears as Uncle Rudy, the weirdly undiscovered eccentric genius of the Reyes family. And Adriana Barraza puts in a mostly understated comic turn with decent heart as Nana Reyes, a character who is not necessarily all that she seems.

But then, well, then there’s everything else…

If I had to summarise my feelings on the film’s plot in one word, it would be unoriginal. Honestly, with the best will in the world there is nothing here that isn’t pulled from the big book of Superhero Story Clichés, and a lot of it goes one step further and forcibly recalls other, better superhero movies. The ‘suit’ the eponymous hero wears can’t help but aesthetically recall the Iron Spider suit worn by Peter Parker in the Avengers movies, the bug-shaped ship looks almost exactly like the Night Owl’s craft from Watchmen, certain musical stings literally copy the same music from other franchises. The whole origin of the hero himself recalls media as widely spaced as the anime Guyver (complete with an almost verbatim repetition of the immortal ‘it’s growing inside of me’ line) with a side of any Spider-Man movie you care to name (and that’s not the only beat it steals from Peter Parker).

More importantly, as a film, the script just really doesn’t hang together in any coherent fashion. The first introduction of the main lead and his romantic interest is just pap. That romantic interest, together with her predictably evil aunt, serve as the movie’s main exposition dumps/narrative devices, pushing the movie from one stage to the next with helpful screeds of background info and the occasional convenient plot device. Uncle Rudy is almost as guilty, being somehow introduced as an eccentric idiot member of the Reyes clan who turns out to be fantastically technologically gifted as well as possessed of a kind of ‘Fonzie’ level of magic with machines which means all he ever really needs to do is give them the right kick and then they work. This, throughout the movie, holds true whether it’s one of his own cobbled-together devices or some advanced piece of engineering.

Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Kord is, apart from being a walking infodump, essentially a two-dimensional villain whose motives are never established. This is not a film interested in giving us a complex main villain with an understandable backstory or relatable motives, but rather a cackling, irredeemable baddy who wants power and wealth for the sake of both. There’s an almost shoehorned in bit of dialogue towards the end which attempts to pencil in a semi-motive, but it’s too little and far too late.

As if recognising this, the movie then also attempts, late on, to add on another bit of complexity for the secondary villain, the monstrous, hulking second to Victoria, Carapax, played by Raoul Trujillo. The problem is that not only is the way this gets inserted ludicrous from a plot standpoint, but it’s also unintelligible – I’m still not sure, having watched it play out, just who exactly Carapax was and what his deal was.

Then there’s the other problems like a wild inconsistency of tone which sees our main hero determined to avoid killing while others on his side seem to have no such issue. The fact that the previous incarnation of Blue Beetle was apparently a successful and famed crime fighter who utterly vanished from the public consciousness in the space of one generation. The difficult to follow major battles which just dissolve into flashy, Transformers-esque light shows which become a little boring when you can’t really see what’s occurring. Or the sickly sweet clichés which serve to solve every issue faced by our heroes, whether mental or physical, with the power of belief/love.

As a line in the sand to firmly distance the new, James Gunn-helmed WB/DC project from the Snyder-verse, it’s a stylistic statement of intent. Its more fun, ludicrous moments recall the similar attempt of Aquaman to lighten the mood. The problem is that the lack of originality, the lacklustre and frankly lazy plot structure and the weird tone combine to make it feel nowhere near as fun as it aspires to be.

And that’s a problem, because honestly, I love that we have so much representation here for a minority which gets very little in a positive bent. I like the lead, and the family all have their moments too. Picking on the movie’s flaws feels somewhat akin to kicking an enthusiastic puppy which is adorable and full of energy but also keeps pooping all over the place and chewing all the furniture. But those flaws are there, and I would be doing no more service to the movie or its positive aspects if I pretended they weren’t than if I were to ignore the good stuff it does.

A flawed experiment then. Post credits stuff suggests that a sequel is certainly hoped for, and I wouldn’t be averse to seeing the whole crew involved here have another stab at telling a tighter, more coherent and more surprising story with these characters. But as it stands, I don’t honestly see this one setting the box office alight. There were plenty of laughs in my screening, but I don’t necessarily think they were with so much as at the movie.

Verdict: Candy-bright visuals and saccharine sweet intentions can’t quite distract from a movie which borrows liberally from every cliché of its genre and fails to do anything new or interesting with any of it. Not awful, but by no means good. 5/10

Greg D. Smith