Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’ve name-checked Blue Beetle ten times in past entries over eleven years. Four of those instances referred directly to Jaime Reyes, who inherited the mantle in 2006 from his Charlton Comics predecessors that DC bought in the early ’80s. Of those four, only once have I gratuitously yet heartily recommended Jaime’s original series, which began in the hands of co-creators Keith Giffen (R.I.P.), Leverage co-creator John Rogers, and artist Cully Hamner, and was carried expertly to the finish line by Rogers and Brazilian artist Rafael Albuquerque. I stopped reading subsequent Beetle books from other teams due to letdown. (If there’s been a grade-A Jaime story printed since 2012, I’m open to recommendations.)

Despite DC Comics’ big-screen misfires, their few rousing successes in recent times gave me the hope I needed to raise my expectations for the Blue Beetle film. I was thrilled by the film, and thrilled to be thrilled. Director Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Miss Bala) don’t try to reinvent the wheel, but their combined talents go a long way toward differentiating Jaime from the hundreds of other superheroes who reached the American mainstream first.

A key ingredient to the mix is our young man bringing Jaime to life, Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai, NBC’s Parenthood). His comics-BFFs Paco and Brenda are nowhere in sight; same goes for Tia Amparo, his crime-lord aunt. The cast has been relocated from real-world El Paso to the Edge Keys barrio on the outskirts of fictional Palmera City (a sign shows they live on El Paso Street, next to Easter Egg Lane). Palmera City’s exotic downtown includes a Lexcorp skyscraper and looks like it’s never seen a hurricane, maybe even has its own invisible weather dome made out of the same magical material as Wonder Woman’s jet. Given the unflattering heinousness we see later in the film from the City’s privatized police force, it’s for the best they decided not to defame El Paso.

As his family’s first college graduate, Jaime is excited to take on the world, except no one bothered to tell him his family’s gone broke and are about to lose their house. Thus into the workforce he goes. A menial pool-cleaning job for local evil corporate overlord Victoria Kord (Academy Award Winner Susan Sarandon) goes nowhere except to a meet-cute with niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), daughter of the late tech whiz Ted Kord (i.e., the Hero Formerly Known as Blue Beetle). Victoria runs the family biz at shiny Kord Tower, but Jenny’s high up enough in middle-management that she can simply tell Jaime to show up Monday for a new job. Since this isn’t a remake of The Secret of My Success, Jaime shows up and stumbles into a top-secret relic on their premises: a mysterious glowing alien totem called The Scarab because it didn’t come with a pretentious name stamped on its shell. No fancy code name in an alien language — just a quick “It’s called the Scarab,” as if the term were Zoroastrian or maybe Thanagarian, and their universe doesn’t already have Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy in it. (One channel-flipping montage proves they sure have del Toro’s Cronos.)

Anyway, several hijinks later, he ends up sneaking The Scarab home because, hey, what’s the worst that could happen? Naturally a superhero origin ensues as it forcibly bonds with him in a rather frightening body-horror transmogrification, right there in the dining room in front of the whole family. As with the comics, there’ll be no secret-identity vexations for Jaime; all his loved ones are in on it from the start. In some ways that’s a delight because that is how close the Reyeses are. And yet, it doesn’t take long before Victoria and her chief henchman Carapax (Raoul Trujillo from Sicario and Mayans M.C.) are leading squads of those aforementioned private-sector “police” to storm quaint li’l Casa Reyes because she wants The Scarab back in her military-industrial-complexified claws By Any Means Necessary. Much like its DC cousin-brother Shazam!, Blue Beetle loves some frivolous romping, but whenever Soto wants to up the dramatic stakes, it can go really dark.

Speaking of which: if you watch only DC movies, the faint similarities to Shazam! are unmistakable (Youngster Learns the Superhero Ropes As He Goes), but if you’re Gen X, you realize it’s a remake of The Greatest American Hero, in which a nice guy in alien gear does a lot of property damage because no one told him how The Suit works. I loved that show as a kid and am not complaining. Whereas Ralph Hinkley’s red togs largely came with Dollar General knockoff-Superman powers, Jaime’s Beetle-armor lets him magically create entire super awesome weapons — or turn into them — with guidance from The Scarab’s HUD (voiced by singer Becky G). Mistakes are made, sure, but he doesn’t need three seasons of trial-and-error to get the hang of it.

Rarely do Hollywood’s superhero exploits afford a hero an extended blood-related family, let alone love them as much as Jaime does his own. Till now, TV’s Hawkeye was the best we had, and the Bartons were just cheerleaders relegated to the cheap seats. (They could’ve at least let Linda Cardellini suit up as Mockingbird.) This departure from the common (bordering on played-out) Found Family trope is a nice change of pace, not to mention the part where we get to root for an entire ensemble rather than just a miserable loner. Entire essays also abound elsewhere online about the Latino heritage that’s intrinsic to Jaime’s Beetle-world, even more so as his IP has transitioned to other guiding hands beyond his original (white) creators. Honestly, now: how many superhero movie/TV headliners have any kind of backstory that merits using the word “heritage”?

Meanwhile over on Team Greed, Sarandon and Trujillo keep things strictly boss/worker (apart from very slight revelations near the end) and speak entirely in rusty villain cliches, though the two of them approach the material with all the gusto of Shakespearean troupe #10,000,006 trying to bring new life to Romeo and Juliet. It’s the stuff of which high melodrama is made. Again, I’m not complaining — this is an action film more than aware of its pop-culture surroundings and gleefully referencing them on the fly (the bellicose warrior howls of Dragon Ball! a very specific Mortal Kombat callback!) and isn’t here to fake anything grander.

I was annoyed to see one old Jack Kirby concept wasted on the villains, and in one late-stage fracas I’m not sure Soto is 100% successful at doing for a Cypress Hill classic what Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did for the Beastie Boys, but it’s pretty cool that he even tried. The nonstop barrage of visual effects is practically flawless compared to the hundreds of millions blown to make The Flash resemble an Oscar-ceremony “salute to superheroes” montage drawn by a drunken A.I. using third-party Photoshop freeware, so there’s that. As an aging comics fan, I appreciated the nods to Beetle’s comics legacy, which won’t matter to newcomers but establish a legacy tapestry of sorts, while setting the stage for him to take Beetlehood to a different level…which, okay, any level other than geek obscurity is an improvement, but still.

It’s a shame Blue Beetle has been lost in the mix as DC’s films find themselves on the cusp of a pre-Crisis/post-Crisis transitional stage, where the current stories technically don’t “matter” to fans who overvalue “canon” as an experiential criterion, and the promised new stories won’t “matter” to anyone — or even exist — for at least a couple more years. You’d think “giant corporation vs. loving family” and bombastic mech-suit fights would’ve drawn more curiosity from the viewership at large. Here’s hoping the Reyes family finds a better reception when they hit home video on Halloween.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: And how about that great Reyes family, the best family unit since Encanto? Sharp-eyed viewers may or may not recognize Dad (Damián Alcázar from Prince Caspian and Narcos), Mom (Elpidia Carrillo — triple bonus points if you remember her as The Woman From Predator), Jaime’s sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo from Hocus Pocus 2), or raucous scene-stealing ex-revolutionary Nana (Academy Award Nominee Adriana Barraza from Babel, plus its polar opposite Rambo: Last Blood). But most viewers will know George Lopez on sight as Uncle Rudy, cranking wackiness up to the max.

Also in the baddies’ corner is Harvey Guillen with far too little screen time as a minion-gofer who’s smarter than his evil master, who takes him for granted and can’t even be bothered to get his name right. So basically he’s Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows trading in his sweaters for a lab coat.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed scenes during and after the Blue Beetle end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…thirty seconds into the end credits, next after the cast list: back in Ted Kord’s lair (the Beetlecave? the Beetle Burrow? the Blue Grotto?), next track on the ancient playlist is Air Supply’s “All Out of Love”, which no one requested. The main computer screen receives a satellite signal from parts unknown. The voice quickly identifies itself. It’s Ted himself! Alive! Somewhere! To be continued, maybe, if this gets a sequel! Which seems deeply improbable!

After the end credits have wrapped up, we’re treated to more clips from a cartoon version of the ’70s superhero show El Chapulín Colorado. Yes, I had to look it up, but that meant I got to learn something new! At the end of his retro slapstick montage, the last word belongs to an offscreen Uncle Rudy: “Ooh, that’s sexy!”