Michael Phillips | (TNS) Chicago Tribune

“Blue Beetle” works, basically, and that puts it ahead of the game for most DC Comics-derived movies. Its scale is more human than corporate. And it’s really nice to get out of Gotham and visit a new fictional urban center: Palmera City, imagined here as Miami with a hint of “Blade Runner,” if “Blade Runner” enjoyed a little sunshine.

The Blue Beetle character has been around since before World War II, in comics, as a radio serial, on TV and in different iterations. This is the first feature film on the subject, about the teenager Jaime Reyes — just graduated from Gotham U, prelaw, dim prospects — who gets a face-full and then a full-body invasion of alien biotechnology. This transforms him into the Blue Beetle, which means he becomes the target of the nefarious Kord Industries, the company developing an army of weaponized humanoid “security forces,” aka Robocops but worse.

That part of “Blue Beetle” may be narratively necessary, but I do not care about that part. What works for me is the material devoted to a specific Mexican American family (Jaime’s), living in the Edge Keys neighborhood of Palmera City. The Reyes’ neighborhood is gentrifying, fast, with rents tripling all over. We are a long way from the vaguely inhuman wealth of your Bruce Waynes and your Tony Starks, though of course audiences love imagining having all the toys and destruction that go with it. The scarcity of money in the hero’s working-class realm doesn’t sneak up on you; it’s a fact of life, every minute. Money may not be everything, but as that dancing superhero Gene Kelly said in “An American in Paris,” when you don’t have money, “it takes on a curious significance.”

The best superhero movies, either DC or Marvel, always have a foot in the pressures and terrors of the real world, and not simply in daydreams of terrorist slaughter. In “Blue Beetle,” Jaime (played by Xolo Maridueña) has saddled his family with college debts. For reasons the movie relies shamelessly on coincidence to establish, Jaime visits Kord headquarters to meet with Jenny Kord, the one truehearted member of the Kord empire. She’s played by Bruna Marquezine, who buoys the spirit of the film.

Jaime is there to discuss a job but ends up with the alien being known as the Scarab inside his body, free of charge. In his Blue Beetle suit of armor, Jaime can fly and customize any sort of weaponry he likes with the help of Khaji-Da, his own his personal Siri-type voice-over coach.

Director Ángel Manuel Soto (”Charm City Kings”) and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (”Miss Bala”) set up periodic smackdowns between B.B. and the similarly powerful Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), a Kord Industries prototype of mass destruction. Susan Sarandon’s sniveling CEO pulls the strings and drops in and out of the plot as needed, muttering threats and ordering attacks on Jaime’s family.

She’s strictly stock material, but “Blue Beetle” is largely successful in making Carapax more than a bunch of mean hardware. Also, the Reyes family really does feel like a family. They’re all good screen company: Elpidia Carrillo and Damián Alcázar portray Jaime’s parents, with the serenely majestic Adriana Barraza as his grandmother (with a helpful guerrilla fighter past). Belisso Escobedo delights as his sharp-witted sister and George Lopez, sporting a beard that appears to have set him free as a performer, plays resourceful if paranoid Uncle Rudy, screaming for the downfall of all the colonialist imperialist forces at work in Palmera City.

Is the movie overtly political? Yes, and often wittily; Lopez has a line about what a fascist Batman can be (though he’s unseen here), and every verbal and visual detail regarding socioeconomic divides, or micro- and macro-aggressive racism, is there on purpose. Virtually none of that stuff’s in the trailers, of course.

While “Blue Beetle” isn’t the same representation achievement the first “Black Panther” was for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movie works on a canvas broad enough to include some wrenching emotional sequences along with the usual superhero selling points. By that I mean: blue bolts of electricity and semi-endless combat. Ten or 11 superhero movies ago, I think I hit my limit on that front. But at least “Blue Beetle” imagines a world, very much like our own, to go with it.

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‘BLUE BEETLE’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some suggestive references, sequences of action, language, and violence)

Running time: 2:07

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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