Blue Beetle 

At first blush, there are few unexpected notes to “Blue Beetle.” When a baddie says, “The love you feel for your family makes you weak,” you know the hero will prove that claim wrong. The villain, Victoria (Susan Sarandon), is hardly configured; it doesn’t take much guessing to know they’re a metaphor for the past and present ills of white-American imperialism. Love will prevail. Self-discovery will happen. And yet, “Blue Beetle” is surprisingly politically spry; the family-bound narrative is shockingly pure; its comedy swerves away from low-hanging memeification. Instead, the film cares more about how these characters mesh.

While the Blue Beetle character dates back to 1939, the updated, culturally specific incarnation of Jaime Reyes didn’t grace DC pages until 2006. Since then, comic book movies have become the center of American pop culture. But those films have only recently attempted to touch every corner of human existence. Marvel Studios has, for instance, the “Black Panther” series and “Eternals,” Sony has the animated “Spider-Man,” while DCU has “Black Adam,” “Aquaman,” “Birds of Prey,” and, to a lesser extent, the “Justice League” film. While diverse, the DCU movies have mostly avoided locking characters into any sort of cultural specificity. “Blue Beetle” marks a sharp break from that unwritten edict.