A very Latino review of the adequately Latino Blue Beetle

polygon.com:

One of the more frustrating things about the experience of marginalized people in modern U.S. culture is how rarely you can say what is actually on your mind. In spite of the constant calls to elevate marginalized voices, those calls often come with the unspoken requirement that those voices be polite, and that they don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

This is a wildly annoying contradiction, one that asks people of color or anyone who doesn’t conform to gender norms to take any number of small indignities in stride, educate the so-called majority, and do it in a way that makes the offenders feel good about themselves. This is how I think of Blue Beetle, a DC superhero movie made by people who clearly have a lot of thoughts about Latin American identity, but lack the leverage to address it with any edge. (Or maybe the willpower. It’s impossible for observers to know which.) They can’t find a way to broach that white discomfort, or to reflect something human.

DC Comics’ hero Blue Beetle was created in 1939 by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, then reimagined and given new identities several times over, until Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner redefined him as a Mexican American kid in 2006. (They were a talented team working during a creatively fertile time in DC history, their whiteness notwithstanding.) His first blockbuster movie appearance tells the story of the character’s 2006 incarnation, Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña), a recent college graduate who encounters, and bonds with, an alien artifact called the Scarab. The Scarab, which contains the essence of an entity known as Khaji Da, uses gross body horror to grant Jaime incredible powers, an indestructible carapace, and the ability to form polymorphic weaponry on