In Review: 'Blue Beetle,' 'Strays'

This week brings an insect-themed superhero from DC and a comedy with a bunch of dirty dogs.

Blue Beetle
Dir. Ángel Manuel Soto
127 min.

Zack Snyder only made three movies featuring DC Comics characters but his shadow has stretched across the entirety of the soon-to-shutter film universe kicked off by his Man of Steel a decade ago. Darkness (literal and figurative) and a habit of relying on grim humor when there’s any humor at all have defined the project. That doesn’t mean it’s lacked highlights, like the first Wonder Woman or incoming architect James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. (And, to be fair, Snyder’s preferred cut of Justice League is a considerable improvement on what made it to theaters, in part because it takes his bombast all the way.) But even the mostly frothy Shazam! brought in jarring bursts of grimness to its tale of a little kid trapped in a superhero’s body. It’s apt that the failure of Black Adam, in which Dwayne Johnson plays a murderous antihero, seemingly drove the final nail into this phase of DC’s film ventures. His character embodied the project and confirmed it really had nowhere else to go.

A few stray projects are still trickling out from the old regime, however, which will draw to a close with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom in December. Among them is Blue Beetle, which suggests that what came to be known as the DCEU had the potential to be fun and meaningful even without heroes who brands bad guys with his symbol knowing they’d be murdered in jail. An adaptation of a deep-cut comic book hero—albeit one who’s been around, in one form or another, since the 1940s—Blue Beetle stars Ramario Xolo Ramirez (Cobra Kai) as Jaime Reyes who, as the film opens, has just become the first member of his Mexican-American family to graduate from college. That’s the good news. The bad: his family’s on the verge of losing their house and his dad Alberto’s (Damián Alcázar)  business is in trouble. Also, Alberto has recently recovered from a serious heart attack.

Things have been better in the Reyes household, and the Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer-scripted, Ángel Manuel Soto-directed film benefits greatly from spending time with Jaime’s family—which includes Nana (Adriana Barraza), Jaime’s grandmother; Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), his sarcastic younger sister; Rocio (Elpidia Carrillo), his supportive mother; and Rudy (George Lopez), a paranoid, stoner-coded uncle with surprising mechanical skills—before plunging into the superhero action. In many respects, Blue Beetle tells a fairly standard superhero origin story, but it’s filled with culturally specific details, from the family’s love of the classic telenovela Maria la del Barrio to a white character’s inability (or refusal) to pronounce Jaime’s name properly to worries of deportation. When the bad guys descend on the Reyes house, the scene’s resemblance to an ICE raid is tough to miss.

It’s not bad as a familiar superhero origin story, either. Ramirez makes for a charming lead as a character who’s understandably more than a little concerned when a strange, beetle-shaped scarab fuses with his body in a borderline Cronenbergian bit of PG-13 body horror (though Jaime clarifies that the scarab did not go, as another Reyes suggests, “up his butt”). Jaime had previously been charged with protecting it by Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), daughter of the founder of a cutting edge tech company. Since her father’s disappearance, however, the firm has been run by Jenny’s unscrupulous aunt Victoria (Susan Sarandon), whose plans include using the scarab to create unstoppable super-soldiers. Fortunately, the scarab, which has a mind of its own, has gifted Jaime with powers and weaponry that could foil Victoria’s plans, if he can figure out how they work.

Until the inevitable effects-heavy final showdown, Soto brings a light touch to the film without losing sight of the seriousness of the Reyes family’s plight. Blue Beetle favors Spider-Man quippiness over operatically clashing musclemen, but the film makes a mid-film loss hit hard and its depiction of the Reyes’ changing neighborhood doesn’t shy away from illustrating how the success of some threatens others’ way of life. It’s a solid beginning for an appealing character, but will it be the end? Gunn has suggested that Jaime might have a place in whatever takes the DCEU’s place. If he doesn’t, Blue Beetle will look like a promising road not taken by a series of films that never fully found their way out of the darkness that spawned them. —Keith Phipps

Blue Beetle begins fusing into the nervous systems of theaters beginning this evening.

Strays
Dir. Josh Greenbaum
93 min.

In 1895, the Lumière brothers unveiled “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon,” a 46-second black-and-white silent short that’s generally considered the first motion picture ever made. 128 years later, cinema has given us a 93-minute live-action comedy, in color and with sound, about talking dogs who curse a lot and pee on each other. Such a How It Started/How It’s Going scenario isn’t really fair to Strays, the hippest imaginable rendering of the Look Who’s Talking formula. But it’s one of those moments when you think about how the medium has evolved, because the Lumières probably couldn’t have imagined our glorious future of squirrel three-ways and Great Dane erections. 

Yet both films are crudely effective. Strays does what it can to parody the sticky-sweet sentimentality of other dog movies, but its central appeal is computer-enhanced pups saying the foulest things possible. Maybe that’s not as profound as people seeing their lives reflected on screen for the first time, but the filmmakers needn’t put much spin on the ball. Strays is not cleverly plotted or visually striking, and its characterization is Post-It note thin, just enough to give each of the four main dogs a little contrast for chemistry purposes. Here’s a film that puts the MPA rating (R for “Pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use”) on a dog tag in the middle of its posters. That’s what it’s intent on delivering. 

And deliver it does. With an excitable, pleading tone, Will Ferrell voices Reggie, a scruffy Border Terrier who blindly adores his owner Doug (Will Forte), despite the ample evidence that Doug is a loser who hates him. Reggie calls their latest game “fetch and fuck,” because Doug drives Reggie far away, whips a tennis ball off into the distance, and winds up saying “fuck” when the dog keep finding his way back home. When Doug finally succeeds in abandoning Reggie in the big city, the scared pup finds a friend in Bug (Jamie Foxx), a Boston Terrier who shows him the ropes and extols the free-living, inanimate-object-humping freedoms of being a stray. The two dogs team up with a keen-nosed Australian Shepherd (Isla Fisher) and a shy, generously endowed therapy Great Dane (Randall Park), who have a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship. 

Once the other dogs make it clear to Reggie that his owner is, in fact, a hateful, abusive lout, Strays takes on a Homeward Bound arc in which the quartet attempt to find their way back to Doug’s home so Reggie can bite off his Johnson. That loose road-movie structure allows for a mishmash of episodic shenanigans, like a lesson in humping garden statues or an unfortunate buffet of hallucinogenic forest mushrooms. Strays is knowing about its dog-movie predecessors—a “narrator dog” takes effective aim on the likes of A Dog’s Purpose, My Dog Skip and others of their kind—but it isn’t above tugging the heartstrings itself. Much as the voice cast, particularly a sharp-tongued Foxx, bounces well off each other and the film detours into inspired surreality, 93 minutes feels like an eternity for a comedy like Strays. Dogs can only run around for so long before they need to curl up for a nap. — Scott Tobias

Strays trots into theaters tonight.