Blue Beetle single-handedly hit the family note harder and better than any of the Fast and Furious movies. Mrs. Know-It-All was about to say the same thing, and she accused me of stealing her stuff.
We just got out of the theater, and this is the spoiler review. A couple of days back I dropped the non-spoiler review and gave my Know-It-All Index rating there. Now we’re going to get Mrs. Know-It-All’s rating and deep dive into it. I’m going to be all over the road, but it’s okay. I’m so excited, because again, we just watched this thing. She says I wouldn’t let her talk about anything else on the way home.
Her starting point is that she knows nothing of Blue Beetle, and that’s fair. Never heard of him, didn’t know who he was, until I got all excited saying, “Oh my gosh, they’re making a Blue Beetle movie.” That’s all she heard, and then boom, it’s here.
I’m a comic book guy and I go back a ways, but I didn’t really get a chance to know the Jaime Reyes character. He came out after I’d shifted out of comics on a hardcore basis. I saw his introduction in Infinite Crisis, which we talked about in the things to know video. What I knew was Ted Kord, who doesn’t have superpowers and is kind of a poor man’s Iron Man, and then this guy with an alien scarab on his back. Until they announced the movie, I didn’t know much about the Jaime Reyes version at all.
And as I said in my non-spoiler, this one had a really close, affectionate place for me.
An Origin Story That Starts at the Front Door
The movie starts right where you might think an origin story would, and that’s fully what this is. Jaime Reyes gets home from college and the family’s all there.
Xolo Maridueña plays him. You guys know him from Cobra Kai, where he’s the main character. We still like him, and he is unbelievable in this.
A little backstory. Blue Beetle was originally supposed to be an HBO Max series. Someone up the pipeline saw a version of it, or some preliminary stuff, and said, “This is epic enough to make it a feature. Why aren’t we doing that?” So they shifted gears and made it an actual movie, and I’m glad they did. So is she.
His family’s all worried, because there’s a ton of news and they don’t know who to share what with. Belissa Escobedo plays his sister, Milagro, and she is unbelievable, so convincing in several parts that it’s just unreal. It’s so funny, she’s the one who gets the family to realize you can make good news sound like something bad.
So he gets home from college to find out they’re losing the house, because Kord is calling it in. They’ve already lost the business. And his father, while he was away at college, had a stroke or a minor heart attack. He’s like, why didn’t I know any of this? Can you imagine coming home from college and being told, by the way, this is all what’s going on? I guess I see why families do that, but man.
Kord Industries plays a big part. Mrs. Know-It-All noticed you see their stuff through the entire opening. He’s flying in, he’s on the bus, he’s arriving at the airport, and they’re all over the place.
The whole thing takes place in a fictitious DC city, like most of the other heroes get. I think they even say it in the movie: Superman has Metropolis, Batman’s got Gotham, the Flash is in Central City, and Blue Beetle’s always been in Palmera City. In the comics, Palmera City is usually located someplace in Texas. Judging by the way this is done, I’m thinking it’s much more coastal than that. It feels like they’re right there on the border of Mexico, and it’s got a very Florida, Miami vibe. She was going to say the same.
George Lopez, Susan Sarandon and the Scarab
George Lopez, God love him. One of my best friends and I love George Lopez. I’ve loved him for years, since The George Lopez Show back in the day, and we’ve seen all his stand-ups. It’s such an interesting role for him, because he plays this very cholo conspiracy theory guy who’s also a brilliant mechanic. Mrs. Know-It-All’s read is that you can tell he’s smart, so when he has these conspiracy theories, you figure he’s probably on to something.
Jaime tells them, don’t worry, I just got back from school, I’m going to get a good job. He hasn’t gone to grad school. He’s pre-law, or as his sister says in one scene, pre-lawyer. So of course she gets him a job at this resort that’s owned by Kord Industries.
That’s where you get to see Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon. She plays such a great sly villain. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I’m very happy with the stuff she’s been doing. In terms of being the bad guy, she’s chewing the scenery hardcore.
There’s an encounter between Victoria and her niece. That’s Bruna Marquezine’s character, Jenny Kord, the daughter of Ted Kord. Jenny’s on the board honorarily, but Victoria’s the CEO, and she’s trying to do this weapon. DC fans will recognize the OMAC armor. OMAC is a cyborg character created by Jack Kirby back in the day, and they name-drop it. There’s all kinds of stuff being name-dropped.
Even though Ted Kord isn’t in this movie, he very much is felt, just like I said in my non-spoiler review. Kord Industries is everywhere, and his daughter is right there. Mrs. Know-It-All says that because she didn’t know much, she learned a whole lot from the few scenes that portrayed him. You get to see the Beetle. You get to see his uniforms and outfits. It’s stupid cool.
There’s also a brief scene early on where Victoria and her people are finding the scarab.
At the resort, Victoria has her very big bodyguard with her, played by Raoul Max Trujillo. He plays Conrad Carapax, who’s already jacked up with tech. He’s got a cyborg arm and stuff, and they sort of telegraph it: he’s the experimental OMAC guy. The prototype, as she put it.
And of course Jaime’s got to step up. “Hey, what is going on here?” He embarrasses himself and gets them both fired, him and his sister. Mrs. Know-It-All defended him. He doesn’t know anything, and he was protecting her, almost. Yeah, totally being the hero guy. Mr. White Shining Armor on a horse.
Jenny catches up to him as he’s walking out and says she’s really sorry about that. She gives him her phone number. Just text me, come by, I’ll help you get another job if I can.
The next day the family drops him off at his interview. The most supportive family ever in the history of ever. They drop him off like it’s his first day of college, and I can only imagine what the Reyes family dropping this boy off at college actually looked like, if this is how they did it for an interview.
Meanwhile Jenny has snuck into the secret experimental area where they have the scarab. She grabs it and puts it in a Big Belly Burger box. DC fans, you’ve seen Big Belly Burger in everything, including and especially The Flash and all the Arrow shows on the CW. As many of you know from the comics, it’s the one constant in the multiverse. Apparently everyone has a Big Belly Burger. It’s their McDonald’s.
She gives him the box. You want a job here, I’ll give you one right now. Protect this box, I’ll find you, and we’ll talk. Don’t look at it, don’t touch it, don’t do anything. Just hold on to the box.
Smash cut to the family standing around the table. We going to open it or not? And they’re all going, “Open it. Open it. Open it.” It’s too funny.
He opens it. Everyone picks it up and looks at it. Then he picks it up, it gets all staticky with blue electricity, it stands up, and it jumps on his face. And it blew him back, too, Mrs. Know-It-All reminded me. It throws George Lopez back and he’s screaming. It was the best.
The Suit Chose Him
Then you go through this whole experience of him dealing with what the suit is doing. You might have seen it in the trailers. He gets thrown into the ceiling and the thing starts coming up over him. It’s almost like the Venom suit in Marvel, where it’s liquidy, but it’s burning everything it touches and burning off his clothes at the same time.
Suddenly he’s in the outfit and it takes him on a test flight. You hear this voice, and that’s Becky G, by the way, playing the voice of the scarab. “Testing now,” and on to the next thing. It chose him. He’s flying around going, “Oh my god, I don’t want this thing.”
This is the part where the suit is trying to protect him, because you find out that’s its job, and he splits a bus. It felt like the most destructive thing you could possibly do. Mrs. Know-It-All was blown away: what is going on? But he’s apologizing the entire time. It’s so funny.
He manages to find Jenny, and she’s being attacked by Carapax, who’s in a discount version of the OMAC suit. So he puts the suit on and goes to protect her. This suit kicks butt. It creates all kinds of swords and guns and everything, and the whole time he’s trying to tell it, “Don’t kill.”
Apparently his family didn’t get the memo. I’m going to tell you right now, everybody, for real: later on, when the chips are down, this family is wasting everybody. Nobody’s safe from La Familia Reyes.
Ted Kord’s Bunker
The whole point from here is he wants to get it off. Jenny finally says, listen, I can try to help, come with me. They go to Ted Kord’s house, the mansion, the Kord estate. She manages to steal his old Ted Kord watch, a callback to the comics, and it activates the key to his underground bunker. His Batcave, if you will, or the beetle cave if you want.
Bro, they give you comic accurate versions of the original Blue Beetle suits, both of them. The original from the ’40s, and the one from the later ’80s and ’90s run, the Ted Kord we know today.
The basic gist is that Ted was never selected, which is all canon with the comics. But he was essentially this universe’s Iron Man. He still wanted to help and be a superhero, so he made up all these suits and did things, and then one day he just disappeared.
Of course they brought George Lopez with them. He’s Uncle Rudy. Uncle Rudy Reyes works his way through it and figures out they can get the scarab off of Jaime, and Mrs. Know-It-All says that’s where you realize he’s brilliant. Absolutely. The catch is Jaime’s going to have to be dead, because that’s the only way.
The thing is becoming symbiotic, and you start to get that idea because Jaime’s healing a little bit. He knows things about the scarab and its history, because they’re starting to understand each other. He knew the scarab’s name immediately.
Up on the roof, you see the helicopter heading toward the Edge Keys. Edge Keys is the rundown, East LA style town they live in, on the outskirts of Palmera City, and Palmera City is the big nice hologram billboards and the whole nine yards. Jaime says, I got to go help. He’s trying to get the suit to do something and it won’t do nothing. Then he realizes, oh, okay, and runs off the roof, because the suit’s going to protect him. It comes on, and he goes.
The First Time I Cried
The whole family is at the house. The police, who by the way are run by Kord Industries, bust in with guns pointing at everything, and everything’s going crazy. That’s when Jaime shows up.
And man, he whoops these guys’ butts. Mrs. Know-It-All was so excited for what a great job he did. I was just blown away.
Up in the helicopter, Victoria is amazed. She wants as much data as possible, because remember, they’re trying to build their discount version in the OMAC suit. It’s the same idea, a thing attached to your back that does things, but they’re missing something.
He sees his family needs help, so he turns his back, and they shoot him with this electro thing that short circuits the scarab. His helmet comes off, and he gets dragged away.
What distracts him is the first time I cried. Damián Alcázar plays Alberto Reyes, the father and the patriarch of the family, and Alberto has a heart attack. The stress of everything.
Mrs. Know-It-All on his sister in that scene: “It got to me when she was sobbing so hard over her father. I thought that was definitely her father. Like that was her real life father, this is a real life situation. She did an amazing job on that.” You felt the pain of each person who was there, because Jaime’s watching it all happen as he’s being dragged away. You felt every emotion in that. And of course, Alberto dies.
Abuelita Has History
Then there’s this wonderful moment. The ambulances have left, the house is smoldering, everybody’s sad. And Nana, Grandma, Abuelita, steps up, bro. Out of nowhere she says, “We have to rescue Jaime. There’ll be time to cry later.” She’s speaking in Spanish, telling everybody what they’ve got to get and what they’ve got to do, and they’re like, “Who are you?”
You come to find out she was a rebel, man. She was a rebel fighter, she was taking them down, and apparently her family did not know this.
Later on they get in the Beetle and they show the guns and stuff, and everyone’s going, “What’s this one? What’s this one?” Milagro gets this little hologram shield thing that also makes a fist. George Lopez of course gets to drive. And then Abuelita turns around and goes, “Shh.” And she’s ready. “One day I’ll tell you my backstory.”
She lays out the whole plan to rescue him, too. They have a hologram thing, and she’s flipping it up and down, zooming in. We need to go in, get down to the basement, once you’re in the basement. She’s giving strategic orders, and Mrs. Know-It-All was like, “Let’s go, Grandma.”
Before this, all you saw her do was watch television and sew. And while she’s sewing, she’s listening to Spanish hip hop. That was it. Then you find out Abuela has history. Or as Baby Know would say, Abuela definitely slayed.
The family dynamic never seemed fake, contrived or kitschy. If it feels fake to you, you don’t come from that kind of family. In another universe, my family would be that family. My grandmother would be the first one saying, “Hey, what do we got to do? Strap up. Let’s figure this out.” My mother would be right there. My cousins, my uncles, we would all come together.
Into the Beetle
Then Jenny shows up and says she can help, and that’s when they go to the Beetle. It’s straight out of the comics. It looks like a giant beetle bug thing. It’s so ugly, it’s adorable. It is amazing.
Meanwhile Victoria has taken Jaime and she’s got him all strapped up. There’s a scientist named Sanchez helping them, and the whole time he’s saying the kid’s going to die, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on. They’re downloading the code from the scarab suit into the OMAC stuff. That code will unlock how to make the OMAC suit do what it was originally designed to do, which would be a clone of the scarab.
Mrs. Know-It-All would think that’d be difficult to do, since this type of technology has to know who you are. Her line: “I feel like it’s like sticking a DVD into a VHS player.” Yeah, absolutely.
The family arrives, and that thing is bulletproof, and they are wasting fools, just stomping through. Everyone drops down, and it’s Jenny and his sister Milagro going through the tunnels, fighting, getting to the place where they need to blow up the energy. Jenny sees that Victoria’s got this OMAC factory ready to be pumped full of the code, and she’s like, “Oh my god, she can make hundreds of thousands.”
They finish the code. Jaime is in a mindscape place, and you get this really heartwarming moment where he gets to see the spirit of his father. Whether or not it’s real, I believe it was genuinely supposed to be the spirit of his father. His father tells him this is your moment. The world around him in this mindscape is crumbling, representative of the world he’s been living in, and you see the Blue Beetle scarab suit floating through the space. You need to go and be who you’re supposed to be.
So he runs as the rest of his life is destroyed, and he jumps at the thing. They show Sanchez in the lab with the brainwaves matching up, and once they sync, they’ve reached full symbiosis. Jaime wakes up, gets out of the thing that’s locked him up, and he’s about to escape.
The Locket
Meanwhile the OMAC suit guy has fully charged up and he’s starting to transform, much like the Blue Beetle does. It’s all burning on his skin, and he becomes this really scary looking thing that looks very much like the OMAC suit from the comics, which is cool.
Right before the transformation, he drops a locket. You see a woman and a kid in it, and slimy Victoria picks it up. Our immediate assumption was that it must be his wife and kid.
You find out later it’s not. As they’re fighting, the suit connects to him and unlocks his memories. This guy started out as a child. Victoria and her people and her thugs carpet bombed his village, found him in the rubble, and brought him in as a test case with a whole bunch of other kids. They messed with his head while they tested this stuff on them, so he didn’t remember any of it. Now those memories are unlocked.
Meanwhile the family finds each other, everyone’s running around, and it’s all chaos. At one point the suit tells Jaime, I can’t help you anymore, because dude is just beating on him. So he has to fight aggressive. The suit’s still enhancing him and giving him all the cool stuff, but it’s a little broken. Almost no regeneration, Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out.
At the end of that battle, they pay off something from earlier. Jaime’s ready to kill him, and the suit stops him. The suit originally was all, I have to protect you, go on. Now that it’s synced with him, it knows he’s not a killer.
That mercy lets Carapax understand that they all understand each other. Victoria’s all but lost, so he turns to her and says, for the greater good, sacrifices must be made. That’s a line she had said throughout their history together, and he remembered it. He tells Jaime to go ahead and go. Then he drags Susan Sarandon into the fire, sets his suit up to explode, and blows the whole island up.
Ted Kord Is Alive
Back home, Jenny takes over. Jaime and his family come back from what is clearly a funeral, and the whole neighborhood shows up. Jenny shows up too. Don’t worry, we’re going to rebuild your house, we’re going to give you help. She gives George Lopez a new truck. He’s stupid funny.
She’s kind of the love interest with Jaime, a will they, won’t they. It ends really well with them blasting off, and then you get two buttons. Well, one cool button. The other one, I don’t know, whatever. Feel free to watch it.
The cool one is the mid credits scene. In Ted Kord’s bunker, the computers all start to come back on, and you hear this really messed up, warbled voice: “Hello, whoever turned my computer on, get a message to my daughter. Tell her I’m alive.”
Ted Kord apparently is alive. I’m firmly of the mindset that the sequel to this movie is going to be the rescuing of Ted Kord, or you find something out. This could be an opportunity to bring in Booster Gold, also.
The Verdict
Blue Beetle is a 9.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index for me, and a 9 from Mrs. Know-It-All.
For those of you who skipped my non-spoiler, I’m reiterating: this movie is a solid 9 and a half, all day long. I would’ve given it a 10 out of 10, but I feel like I need to keep that as a plateau that things need to strive for. I’m blown away by this.
Her take was a 9. “I can see why yours would be, but I’m hesitant for that half point because I wanted to like Flash, and that let me down. So I’ll give it a nine.” She’s really getting excited about DC right now. Amidst the chaos that’s happening with the Marvel stuff and the disappointment we’ve been finding there, she was really surprised by this.
This is also a pre-James Gunn movie, one of the last ones. I think the order they’re coming out in is wrong, and timing-wise Aquaman should’ve come out first. So we still have Aquaman to look forward to. I say look forward to. But he’s already intimated that this can easily roll into the new DC Universe. And it’s a brand new story that DC hasn’t told yet.
This felt to me like a phase one Marvel movie, and I said that in my non-spoiler review. I remember I leaned over at one point and said to Mrs. Know-It-All, “This could easily be the Iron Man of the DCU.” By that I mean it’s an initial movie that sets a tone. It felt right. All the pieces came together. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, I don’t know what the backstory is, but I’m jazzed.
For people who talk about superhero fatigue: bro. Better writing, and newer faces. Not that older faces are bad, but these are newer faces.
I Saw My Family in That Family
I had a discussion with my best friend, a good friend of mine who’s Dominican, and I’m Puerto Rican myself. He was all like, “You’re sounding like one of those woke people.” And I said, look, bro, I don’t know how to say this, but representation matters.
I was blown away by how good this movie was, and it was only made better by the fact that I saw my family in that family. That family dynamic is the one I grew up with. I recognized Grandma. I recognized the crazy uncle. Trust me, they’re all crazy.
I texted my mom. I said, “Mama Know-It-All, you got to take Grandma Know-It-All to go see this, and tell her I insisted.” She doesn’t go to movies. She’ll go just because I said so.
We got in the car after the movie and Mrs. Know-It-All said, “I think I’m a Blue Beetle fan. I don’t know what else to say.” She’s glad she came into this not knowing anything about Blue Beetle. She thinks Baby Know-It-All and Boyfriend Know-It-All can go see it and come out Blue Beetle fans, too.
I want to go see this in the theater again. I’ll spend the money to do it again, and it’s been forever since a movie made me feel like that. I honestly think the last one was Endgame. We went back a couple of times to see Endgame, and when they re-released it briefly with that special release, I went again. Truthfully, I’ll probably go see this one tomorrow. I’m an AMC Stubs member, we watched it at our local AMC, and I was sitting there thinking, “Oh my gosh, I want to pay more money now to go see this movie.”
This one went a little bit longer than my normal videos, but it was exciting talking about it.
If you’ve already seen the movie, tell me what you thought and what your score is. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
