What Actually Happens
The film follows Molina, a gay window dresser imprisoned for "corruption of minors," and Valentin, a Marxist revolutionary. To escape their grim reality, Molina recounts elaborate fantasy film plots starring the glamorous Spider Woman - played by Lopez in increasingly elaborate musical sequences.
On paper, it works. The contrast between harsh prison reality and glittering fantasy. The way storytelling becomes survival. The relationship that develops between two men who shouldn't connect but do.
In execution? It's a beautiful, campy, ultimately hollow experience that mistakes style for substance.
The Camp Without The Bite
Here's the fundamental problem: Kiss of the Spider Woman dazzles with campy spectacle but struggles to connect its glamorized fantasy to real revolution.
The musical numbers are gorgeous. Lopez serves looks. The production design is lush. The camp factor is dialed to eleven, which feels appropriate for a story about a man who escapes reality through movie fantasies.
But camp without purpose is just pageantry. And this film desperately needed to ground its spectacle in the brutal political reality it's supposedly commenting on.
The original story worked because the contrast between Molina's fantasies and the prison's horrors created tension. The escape wasn't just entertainment - it was survival. It was resistance. It was two men finding humanity in an inhumane system.
This version gives us the fantasy but softens the reality. It's less macabre and more tender than its source material, which sounds nice but actually defangs what made the story powerful. You can't have effective escapism without showing us what we're escaping from.
The J-Lo Problem
Let me be clear: Jennifer Lopez is not a bad actress or performer. But she's fundamentally wrong for this role.
The Spider Woman needs to be magnetic, dangerous, seductive in a way that feels almost supernatural. She's a fantasy figure - larger than life, mysterious, with an edge that makes you understand why Molina is so captivated.
Lopez brings glamour. She brings professionalism. She brings J-Lo.
But there's a blank space where a truly magnetic title character ought to be. She's playing a character who exists entirely in fantasy, but she never quite transcends into that otherworldly space. She's too grounded. Too familiar. Too much herself.
The role needed someone who could disappear into camp excess and make it feel essential rather than decorative. Someone who could be both ridiculous and genuinely compelling.
Instead, we get Lopez doing her best with material that needed someone willing to go further, weirder, and darker.
The Musical Numbers Don't Connect
The movie-within-a-movie concept should have been this film's strength. Fantasy sequences that comment on, contrast with, or illuminate the prison drama. Musical numbers that reveal character or advance the emotional story.
Instead, they feel like interruptions. Beautiful interruptions, sure. But interruptions nonetheless.
You watch them thinking "this is lovely" and then "okay, when are we getting back to the actual story?" rather than feeling like the fantasy sequences ARE the story, or at least an essential part of it.
The disconnect between camp spectacle and prison drama never resolves. They coexist side by side without really interacting with each other. And in a film where that relationship should be the entire point, that's a fatal flaw.
What This Could Have Been
Here's what makes this so frustrating: I can see the movie this should have been.
A story about survival through storytelling. About finding humanity in inhuman circumstances. About the radical power of imagination. About two men from entirely different worlds connecting over shared vulnerability.
About how sometimes the most political act is simply refusing to let reality destroy your capacity for beauty, fantasy, and hope.
All of that is theoretically in this film. But it's smothered under musical numbers that prioritize spectacle over meaning, performances that can't quite access the depths the story requires, and a fundamental unwillingness to go as dark as the material demands.
The Verdict
Kiss of the Spider Woman isn't terrible. It's professionally made. It's often beautiful. If you go in wanting a campy musical with gorgeous production design, you might enjoy it.
But if you go in wanting what this story should deliver - a powerful exploration of resistance, survival, and human connection under oppression - you'll leave disappointed.
I wanted to love this. I wanted it to work. I wanted Jennifer Lopez to surprise me. I wanted the musical numbers to matter. I wanted the camp to have teeth.
Instead, I got a movie that looks great, sounds fine, and ultimately says very little.
Sometimes the most frustrating films aren't the complete disasters. They're the ones that had everything they needed to be great but couldn't quite figure out how to put it together.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is a beautiful film. But beauty without substance is just decoration.
And this story deserved more than that.
Did you see Kiss of the Spider Woman? Am I being too harsh? Let me know in the comments.