Bill Condon's Kiss of the Spider Woman delivers on dance numbers but the rest of the film is hit or miss

As a person who does not like musicals yet ends up watching them—at least in cinematic form—far more frequently than I might wish, my one hope each time the theater lights go down is that the musical at least feature some good choreography. Because while I don’t care for musicals, as a form, I did grow up on MTV, and I love a good dance break. Kiss of the Spider-Woman, starring Jennifer Lopez as the eponymous Spider-Woman, at least some of the time, does deliver on the dance numbers. It’s the rest of the film that is hit or miss.

Set in 1980s Argentina, under the thumb of a military junta at the end of the Dirty War, Spider-Woman stars Tonatiuh and Diego Luna as Luis and Valentin, respectively. They are cell mates, Luis imprisoned for the vague but queer coded “public indecency”, and Valentin is a leftist revolutionary who has not yet ratted on his fellow revolutionaries. Thus, Luis is placed in his cell to spy, with promises of treats and an early release dangled before Luis. The two men are diametrically opposed, Luis is femme and imaginative, Valentin macho and calculating. They inevitably fall in love.

Their story is interwoven with a movie-within-a-movie, though, as Luis recounts the movies of his favorite silver screen siren, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). At first, Valentin is repulsed by Luis’s flights of fancy, but the worse life gets in the prison, the more Valentin embraces Luis’s storytelling, which eventually places Luis and Valentin inside the fantasy as characters in the movie. Written and directed by Bill Condon (from an internecine combination of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel and the Nineties Broadway show from Terrence McNally, John Kander, and Fred Ebb), who has plenty experience with movie musicals such as Chicago, Beauty and the Beast, and to a less technical extent, Dreamgirls, Spider-Woman is overtly about the escapism of cinema and the freedom of self that exists in cinematic realms.

It is a little interesting, then, that the film never delves deeper than the surface in how Luis’s imaginings relate to his, and Valentin’s, real lives. Luis is gay, but maybe also trans, as he presents femme and even talks about identifying with women more than he does his own male form. Spider-Woman doesn’t dig into that, though, even though the imagined musical scenes are a perfect vehicle for such exploration, the escapism of imagination does not connect to Luis’s latent transness. Similarly, Valentin’s macho Marxist act covers his own queer inner self, but the film never challenges how growing up in an oppressive regime forced this identity onto him, or how imagination is the only true freedom he has.

There are a lot of big ideas in Spider-Woman, but none of them are executed particularly well. The most interesting element of the film is that Luis and Valentin’s greatest intimacy derives from a bout of explosive diarrhea, which is the sort of disgusting yet romantic combination you get when you mix brutal torture, crushing imprisonment, and burgeoning love. It is at once the humiliation of incarceration and the freedom of intimacy. But nothing else in the film approaches that combination of theme and execution.

At least there are good dance numbers. Lopez dances as if her feet are on fire, and Condon shoots most of the dance sequences fully in frame, which means we can actually enjoy the choreography from Sergio Trujillo, Christopher Scott, and Brandon Bieber. Lopez’s vocals are autotuned to hell and back, which is a little out of step with the Golden Age of Hollywood stylings of Ingrid Luna, and the songs are completely forgettable, but the dance numbers do stand out. The acting stands out as well, particularly from Tonatiuh and Lopez, who plays three roles (movie star Ingrid, and characters Aurora and the Spider-Woman). Diego Luna is also very good, he’s aging into a weathered handsomeness that works well for these sorts of downtrodden characters, but Tonatiuh is a revelation as Luis. He is finding notes that simply are not on the page, giving a depth to Luis that Condon’s script does not bestow.

The central trio of actors are good enough that I wish the film was better overall. For all the craft and care that went into styling Spider-Woman, it feels like Condon spent about a third as much time on the actual story, even though he takes significant swings away from the previous texts, which suggests some thought did go into this. It just doesn’t translate on the screen. For a film about imagination and feeling, Kiss of the Spider-Woman is cold, never more than a surface exploration of the characters and themes. At least it has good dance numbers.

Kiss of the Spider-Woman will play exclusively in theaters from October 10, 2025.