It seems to be an unwritten rule that the best superheroes are birthed from troubled family backstories. Bruce Wayne witnessed the brutal killing of his parents, Spider-Man was orphaned at an early age and Superman was exiled from his home planet of Krypton and never met his parents. The big screen adaptation of “Blue Beetle,” a DC superhero movie now playing in theatres, breaks with tradition. “My family? That’s what makes me strong,” says Jaime Reyes a.k.a. Blue Beetle.
When we first meet Reyes, played by “Cobra Kai” star Xolo Maridueña, he is an ambitious recent college grad on the hunt for a job. Back home in Palmera City his family is in financial trouble and Jaime wants to help out.
His job search puts him in contact with a sentient ancient alien relic known as the Scarab, which kind of looks like a fancy broach my mother may have worn in 1978. The powerful, parasitical piece of biotechnology chooses Jaime as its symbiotic host, transforming the young man into the superhero Blue Beetle. Grafted together, Jaime and the Scarab now possess a glowing armor-clad blue suit and powerhouse abilities like flying through space, the manifestation of weapons and more.
“The universe has sent you a gift,” says Uncle Rudy Reyes (George Lopez), “and you have to figure out what to do with it. Maybe this time we get our own superhero.”
Trouble is, Jaime doesn’t want to be a superhero, despite being chosen by the Scarab. “How do we get it to un-choose me?” he asks.
Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), the super villainous CEO of Kord Industries, understands the power of the Scarab and Jaime’s Blue Beetle, and knows how to take control of it. “Target the [Reyes] family!” she says.
“Blue Beetle” makes history as the first Latino DC superhero to lead a film, but the freshness that comes along with that is overwhelmed by the usual superhero dross. The emphasis on family gives the movie a nice vibe that sets it apart from other DC movies, but the strength Jaime garners from his family and culture does not strengthen the plot as a whole. It still a superhero origin story. That means it comes weighted down with details, exposition and the usual getting’ to know you, getting’ to know all about you, tropes.
It does attempt to go deep with subplots about marginalization, resistance and even a little body horror woven into the story, but again, those elements are overshadowed by the accompanying bombast.
Maridueña cuts a swathe through the CGI noise and fight scenes with considerable charm and kind of an “aw-shucks” sensibility that grounds his high-flying character. As the comic relief, Lopez gets a few laughs and Sarandon is deliciously amoral as the billionaire villain, but this is Maridueña’s show.
Culturally “Blue Beetle” breaks ground in its depiction of Latino culture but as a superhero movie, it is the same old.
No one will ever say that Shia LaBeouf isn’t committed to his art. He left behind a big-time career in blockbuster movies to concentrate on making smaller, more interesting films. For his latest role, a sociopath who says things like, “Do I have to kill anyone today? I have my nice shoes on,” he got a giant torso tattoo to help him find the character’s authenticity. That’s commitment. It’s a shame “The Tax Collector,” now on VOD, doesn’t make good use of LaBeouf or the tat.
Set in South Los Angeles, the movie follows David (Bobby Soto) and sidekick Creeper (LaBeouf), violent men who collect payments, or “taxes,” from 43 different street gangs for Wizard, an enigmatic crime boss currently residing as a guest of the state. They are feared and respected in equal measure but when Wizard’s old rival Conejo (Jose Martin) shows up after a ten-year absence, life on the street changes. Conejo and his deadly girlfriend (Cheyenne Rae Hernandez)—“She’s like the female you,” David says to Creeper.—plan on taking over, edging Wizard out. David can either sign on or face the grim repercussions for his loyalty to the old regime. When he refuses to kiss the ring and join the new family things get bloody. “Everything you love is going to die real fast.”
“The Tax Collector” is rich with details of gang life and atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s also ripe with hackneyed depictions of the same. Director and screenwriter David “Training Day” Ayer replays themes of love, honor, loyalty and family that have been played to death (literally) in almost every gangster film ever made. It’s stylishly made but no amount of tricky camera angles will erase that sense of déjà vu.
It’s propped up somewhat by solid performances from Soto and LaBeouf, who, contrary to internet chatter is not playing a Hispanic character. Soto, as the family man with a dark side, shares good chemistry with LaBeouf in their chattier moments. Ayer perfected the riding-around-in-cars dialogue schtick in “Training Day” and uses they make the most of it here.
The movie’s biggest surprise is the casting of comedian George Lopez as David’s Uncle Louis, a garage mechanic with a violent past. He’s gutsy and gritty and in his limited time on screen makes an impression as opposed to Martin who plays Conejo with all the finesse of a pantomime villain.
“The Tax Collector” is a violent, gore soaked portrait of gang life with nothing new to say.
There was a time when Christopher Walken’s name on the marquee meant quality. Think The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone or King of New York. Oh, how things have changed. He’s a great performer, but in recent years he has allowed his quirky personality and off beat vocal pattern to take precedence over real acting. In short, he has stopped acting and become a personality. His movie choices of late have been erratic. A supporting role as an existential TV repairman in Click, an idiosyncratic campaign manager in Man of the Year opposite Robin Williams and even a joke shop operator married to John Travolta in Hairspray. Eccentric roles all, but they all pale by comparison to his latest outing, a silly hybrid of Enter the Dragon and The Karate Kid with a dash of The Keystone Cops thrown in called Balls of Fury.
Walken plays the evil Feng, crime family boss and table tennis fanatic who bets heavily on child ping pong prodigy Randy Dakota (Dan Fogler) to win a major tournament. When the youngster suffers a humiliating defeat at that destroys his career Feng kills the youngster’s father to satisfy a gambling debt.
Cut to 19 years later. Dakota is a ping pong performer at a Las Vegas dive when he is recruited by a CIA agent (George Lopez) to infiltrate Feng’s super secret ping pong play-offs and help bring down Feng’s crime syndicate.
This is an extremely silly movie, and I don’t have no trouble with silly as long as it’s funny, but that’s where things go south in Balls of Fury. There are some laughs, but instead of the wall-to-wall guffaws the trailer promises, the jokes are few and far between. Walken, dressed in a series of outrageous Madame Butterfly inspired gowns, should be hilarious, but he settles for strange rather than funny. He really needs to be a bit more discerning when it comes to choosing scripts.
As Randy Dakota Tony Award winner Dan Fogler comes across as the poor man’s Jack Black. He has Black’s tubby-but-agile style down pat, but doesn’t deliver the charm or the grace of the School of Rock star. His resemblance to Black becomes distracting when it becomes obvious that this might have been a funnier movie if the filmmakers had just spent the money for the real Jack Black instead of settling for a pale, frizzy haired imitation.
Balls of Fury is the first table tennis movie to come out of Hollywood since Forrest Gump, but I don’t expect its modestly funny charms are going to spark a revival of this long-neglected genre.
