Jennifer Lopez’s movie-musical is another disappointment

PARK CITY, Utah — The movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” based on the Tony Award-winning 1993 Broadway show by John Kander and Fred Ebb, has its work cut out for it from the opening credits.

After all, two of the greatest movie-musicals ever made were adapted from that legendary duo’s oeuvre: “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” Both of those stylish hits are, for good reason, enduring Best Picture winners.

I doubt cinema-classic status will be the path for wobbly Ms. “Spider Woman,” which premiered Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival. Caught in her web, I was not. 

Yes, star Jennifer Lopez’s singing and dancing wow as silver screen goddess Ingrid Luna. That’s her forte, so no shock there. And newcomer Tonatiuh, playing gay prisoner Luis Molina, is a vulnerable and charismatic find.

But “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon’s off-putting movie is a visual and narrative mess; polished where it should be gritty and ugly where it must be glamorous. Bland, almost always.     

The story from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel exists in two opposing worlds. Harsh reality is the cramped, dank Argentinian prison cell during the 1981 Dirty War that Molina, a flamboyant window dresser who’s a chatty optimist despite having been dealt a cruel hand, shares with cranky political dissident Valentin (Diego Luna). 

Far away from that claustrophobic cage, we’re whisked to Molina’s escapist fantasy: kaleidoscopic scenes from the fictional 1950s movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring Ingrid Luna as Aurora, that he recounts to his roomie at night to escape the grime. 

At first, Valentin is irritated with all the showtunes jabber. He hates musicals. But the outspoken revolutionary soon gets sucked in by the plot.

The same cannot be said of the film’s audience.

The contrast between the movie’s two identities is essential. Condon has scrapped the Broadway show’s clink songs normally sung by Molina and Valentin, which was the right choice, even if it meant losing Molina’s fabulous intro tune “Dressing Them Up.” 

Keeping incarceration music-free means oppressed Molina’s dreams are poetry, while his actuality is prose. Nice idea, but life behind bars still looks and feels awfully stagey. The environment is never believable, and therefore lacks real threat. You can easily picture the scenic painters clocking out seconds before “action!”

An equal-and-opposite problem mars the should-be lavish old-Hollywood pastiche numbers with Lopez. The production design and cinematography are so shabby, they gave me arachnophobia. The budget-friendly sets alternate between high-school cafetorium and miniature golf course. More prison-like, to my mind.

For the dances such as “Gimme Love,” Condon opts for wide, continuous shots that show off Lopez’s exemplary skill. That is a genuine pleasure of old Hollywood films — watching Gene Kelly nail a sequence in a single go without an editor’s help. The same is true of the radiant Lopez, whose belting and hoofing is better than her acting. Granted, Aurora isn’t Lady Macbeth.

The problem is, without closeups and cuts, the missing lavishness becomes plainly obvious. Like flipping on fluorescent lights in a half-cleaned living room, you spot the scuff marks and the flimsy plywood. The stages are deathly airy and there aren’t enough dancers to adequately fill them. There’s no awe.

Besides those 11 performances of Kander and Ebb’s masterful songs, there is a knotty movie-within-a-movie plot involving a love triangle that’s carelessly breezed through. Its developments are difficult to follow, and the mood is lethargic and non-committal as though the actors are lampooning the genre instead of legitimately trying. 

“Spider Woman” improves in the final third as the ice melts between Molina and Valentin. Molina has been harboring a dangerous secret, and Valentin starts to consider his cellmate not as annoying, but caring and damaged. Tonatiuh and Luna forge a genuine chemistry.

Intimate, connected moments are vital to the story. But this is, at its core, a movie-musical, and an ultimately unsatisfying one. 

If you left Rob Marshall’s “Chicago” singing, “It’s good, isn’t it? Great, isn’t it? Grand, isn’t it? Swell, isn’t it?,” you’ll leave “Kiss of the Spider-Woman” muttering, “It was meh.”