Film reviews: Alistair Harkness on Blue Beetle, T.I.M. and Billion Dollar Heist

A warmed-over origins story with some contradictory messaging about violence, Blue Beetle is a forgettable addition to an already saturated comic-book movie landscape, writes Alistair Harkness

Blue Beetle (12A) **

T.I.M. (N/A) **

Billion Dollar Heist (PG) ***

Sorry suckers, the party’s over. Even without the evident superhero fatigue that’s causing films with characters you’ve actually heard of to flop, DC’s latest offering, Blue Beetle, is a rubbish addition to an already saturated comic-book movie landscape. A warmed-over origins story with some contradictory messaging about violence, it plays like a weak riff on Marvel’s rival Ant-Man films, with a bit of Venom and various iterations of Spider-Man thrown in.

Newcomer Xolo Maridueña takes the lead as Jaime Reyes, a recent college graduate who returns home to discover his future prospects are worse than when he left. His Mexican immigrant parents are on the verge of losing their house, his hard-working dad has had a heart-attack, the family business has gone under, gentrification is driving up rents, and the only jobs a poor Mexican kid with a degree can get are the menial ones on offer at a local tech firm known for manufacturing advanced weaponry for the military.

Run by a maniacal matriarch named Victoria Kord (a slumming it Susan Sarandon), said company is on the verge of launching a hi-tech combat suit powered by a sentient alien artefact that Kord’s company has unearthed in one of its many ethically dubious cobalt mines. When fate conspires to place this extraterrestrial scarab in Jaime’s hands, though, it invades his body, fuses with his brain and encases him in a super-powered suit replete with various insect-like limbs and wings to help him fly. (The suit also has a habit of shredding his clothes, ensuring he always emerges from it naked, like Bruce Banner without the Hulk’s stretchy shorts.)

Thenceforth the film follows standard first-instalment protocol as Jaime teams up with Kord’s renegade do-gooder niece (Bruna Marquezine) and his own tech-whizz uncle (George Lopez) to figure out how to harness his new powers and protect his family from Kord as she sends her prototype soldiers after him. Along the way, the film makes a big deal about Jaime’s superhero worthiness by emphasising his insistence on using only non-lethal force against his enemies, a noble act somewhat undermined by the film’s subsequent attempt to generate laughs by having Jaime’s comic-relief grandma slaughter bad guys with an over-sized machine gun.

We also learn there was a previous Blue Beetle a scant 15 years before, only nobody seems to remember him. Perhaps director Angel Manuel Soto is making a subtler point here about Latino visibility in the wider world, but what this subplot really underscores is that the character (which has actually been around in comic book form since 1939) is obscure for a simpler reason: he’s a bit naff.

Weirdly enough, the film was initially conceived as a straight-to-streaming movie, much like the cancelled Batgirl, which begs the question: just how bad was that film was if a movie featuring Michael Keaton’s Batman was shelved while this was deemed good enough for cinemas?

Like an especially rubbish episode of Black Mirror, T.I.M. posits a very-near-future in which the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence has – wait for it – grave consequences for humans. In this instance, it has grave consequences for Georgina Campbell’s Abi, a prosthetics engineer newly arrived at a tech firm that’s trying to rush a line of robotic household manservants into the market (“Got to beat the Chinese,” her boss keeps informing her).

Never mind that these blond-haired master race clones have obvious design flaws that extend beyond the too-tight grip Abi has been brought in to fix. From the moment Abi’s company-assigned bot (or “Technologically Integrated Manservant”) is activated, it gives off creepy stalker vibes – like having a nascent serial killer on hand to do your dishes, watch you sleep and put any rodents scurrying around your smart kitchen down the waste disposal. Abi’s Scottish husband Paul (Mark Rowley) certainly smells a rat, but he’s still on probation for having an affair, so Abi is less inclined to take seriously his paranoia about whether or not the T.I.M. (played by Eamon Farren) is sabotaging their relationship so it can have Abi all to itself.

Ironically, the terrible script ensures the human characters sound about as natural as their emerging robot overlords. And unlike this year’s vastly superior M3Gan, it also never resolves the central dilemma of why anyone would want something like this in their home in the first place.

There’s yet more malevolent tech in Billion Dollar Heist, a slick cyber-crime documentary exploring a 2016 effort to steal a billion dollars in fraudulently transferred funds. The robbery was actually thwarted by the perpetrators themselves, who lost their nerve after one of their aliases was randomly flagged for something unconnected to what they were really doing (they still made off with a cool $81 million). That in itself goes some way to illustrating how precarious the digital infrastructure that now connects the world actually is: sheer dumb luck was the only thing that prevented the full amount disappearing into the ether.

The film gets into the baffling nitty-gritty of what really happened, but is actually more compelling as a primer on the history of cybercrime itself. If the subject isn’t innately cinematic (there’s a reason Michael Mann’s Heat is an undisputed classic and his hacker drama Blackhat is not), directors Daniel Gordon, Brendan Donovan and Bryn Evans use a lively mix of talking-head interviews, re-enactments, archival footage and animation to compensate for the absence of guns-blazing bank robberies.

Blue Beetle is in cinemas from 18 August; T.I.M. streams on Netflix from 18 August; Billion Dollar Heist is available on digital download now.

Film reviews: Blue Beetle | T.I.M. | Billion Dollar Heist