Jennifer Lopez is not having her best era and I hate to see it! Let’s talk about The Kiss of the Spider Woman and then I have some observations about why everyone is so seemingly jumping on the I Hate Jennifer Lopez bandwagon (and pretending they were never singing along to her songs back in the day).
The Kiss of the Spider Woman was a book in the 70s, a movie musical in the 80s, a stage musical in the 90s, and another movie musical starring Jennifer Lopez today. The story itself is a tale within a tale: two prisoners in South America (Brazil or Argentina, depending on the staging) bond over the course of the film as the apolitical gay one tells the heterosexual revolutionary about his favorite movie. In this latest staging, all of the songs are contained within the Favorite Movie which is shot like a technicolor musical full of flashy costumes and Jennifer Lopez at the palest I have ever seen her. Really. I think she must have avoided the sun for a year in order to be that white on screen.
I’m not a fan of the original. The movie won William Hurt his only Oscar and the stage musical won Chita Rivera her second Tony, but I don’t really like the music, the story is slow, and the budding relationship between the prisoners always feels awkward (and regressive in 2025). I really enjoyed what Bill Condon did with Dreamgirls on the big screen though, even pulling a decent performance out of Beyonce who should never, ever be cast in movies, so I was interested to see what he would do with Spider Woman.
In the words of Aretha: great gowns, beautiful gowns.
Everything in the Musical is stunning. The costumes, the hair, the sets — everything POPS. And that’s it. The music isn’t good, so it needs real singers to elevate them, not Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez. Mind you, they sound fine and I don’t really expect the very best voices to appear in movie musicals. I enjoyed Emma Stone in La La Land. I enjoyed Meryl Streep in Mama Mia. I enjoyed Emily Blunt in Mary Poppins. I even enjoyed Madonna in Evita. I also enjoyed Jennifer Lopez in The Kiss of the Spider Woman. She sounds better than she ever has, and that’s not shade. When people say JLo can’t sing, I understand what they’re trying to say and the dogpile they’re trying to hop on, but she’s not bad. If you can listen to the title track and say “JLo sounds terrible,” then that’s honestly just bias that isn’t rooted in any kind of auditory information reaching your ears.
And JLo has always been good on film. From Selena to Anaconda to Monster-in-Law, Jennifer Lopez is a magnetic screen presence and she’s the best part of this movie. Whenever the film goes back to the prison, I’m itching for the musical to start up again. Even though the musical’s story is so thin it doesn’t even bear mentioning, she lights up every scene that she’s in to the point where I almost want to see the fictional movie in its entirety.
I say almost because, aside from the music being boring, the dance sequences make an already long movie feel even longer. At over 2 hours, it’s a commitment, and even though the musical within the film is less than 40 minutes of screentime, it could have been 30 if they’d cut some very unimpressive dance sequences. When I saw Tony Dovolani pop up as the villain in the musical, I was ready for choreography! For anyone who isn’t a middle-aged white woman from the Midwest, Tony Dovolani was one of the pros on Dancing with the Stars for over 20 seasons, winning the Mirror Ball once with Melissa Rycroft of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Making the Team fame. Being that this version is set in Argentina, and one of his best dances is the Argentine Tango, I was SEATED and SAT for this performance! Color me shocked and disappointed that the performances on DWTS are better than all of the dance sequences in a $35 million Hollywood Musical. Jennifer Lopez is not a great dancer. She spends most of her sequences spinning from one position to the next, and when she’s put front and center, it’s an awkward shimmy and some useless hand motions. I’ve never been so mystified by a choreographer’s choices in my life.
Outside of the musical, Diego Luna gives another Diego Luna is a Good Actor performance, playing against relative newcomer Tonatiuh (who was actually pretty good in the action-thriller Carry On a couple of years ago) as a gay window dresser who doesn’t know whether to be a camp stereotype, a tragic stereotype, or a baby trans stereotype. I want to support the gays, but I do not support the gays wiping some straight man’s shitty asscrack (and they showed the shit, for what!). In the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty-Five, we don’t need to keep doing adaptations of things where gay men have to debase and sacrifice themselves for the good of straight people.
The Kiss of the Spider Woman is fine. If you’re avoiding it because it has Jennifer Lopez, reevaluate that position, because she’s great in it and she’s the best part of the movie. If you’re avoiding it because the original isn’t your cup of tea, then there’s nothing Bill Condon or anyone else is doing here that will change your mind.
Score: 2.5 / 5
Why does everyone hate Jennifer Lopez now?
Jennifer Lopez is a mediocre singer, a mediocre dancer, and a decent actress. Of the three, I would rather watch JLo in a movie than listen to her sing or watch her dance. I can’t think of a bad performance JLo has had in a movie (but she’s had some bad movies, of course), but I can think of several many various and sundry videos of Jennifer Lopez dancing poorly or singing badly.
I’m still mystified by the fact that JLo came to fame as a Fly Girl on In Living Color and then landed a plum job as a backup dancer for Janet Jackson when the lady has never proven to me that she can actually dance. Go back and look at her first music video for “If You Had My Love.”
There is nothing here that would say to me that’s one of Janet Jackson’s dancers. If you hadn’t told me she was a dancer, I would’ve thought she was just another pop starlet picking up some choreography before the video shoot. Every single JLo dance break is a disappointment when you put her up against dancers like Janet, Aaliyah, Ciara, Mya, or even P!nk (when she was Black). The breakdown for “Get Right” was laughable when the video came out, but I think we were all under a cloud of her superstardom that muted any desire to critique what she was giving.
As far as her voice, I think the shots at her lack of vocal talent are a little overblown. When you compare her to the women on her early songs (Christina Milian and Ashanti), is there all that much difference in their singing talent or lack thereof? On a scale of successful singers from Britney Spears to Whitney Houston, I would stick Jennifer Lopez firmly in the middle alongside the aforementioned Christina/Ashanti as well as Mya and Madonna.
So where is the hate coming from? She gave us a string of bops for years and years, far longer than most pop stars, and movies that still have rewatchability. Where did the tide turn? I think it’s partly due to her own attitude, or perceived attitude, and just general misogyny, which might explain some of the perceived attitude.
Jennifer Lopez had an early reputation as a bit of a brat. She hopped in the press to drag several actresses after she got high on her own supply starring in Selena and decided she was the best actress in the world. I think that ego has followed her throughout her career, but now that the creative output is of lower quality, and she doesn’t have the blinding sun of being the biggest star in the country, it’s easier to focus on her ego.
Jennifer Lopez performed a six-minute tribute to Motown at the Grammy Awards in 2019. She’s not Black, she’s never been signed to Motown, and she’s not a soul singer, so what explains her involvement other than her own ego telling her she was indeed qualified to do that performance? I guarantee you if Taylor Swift or Madonna had been offered that spot, they would have turned it down, but for some reason Jennifer Lopez thought that she, over all of the other singers in the industry, could put on a great performance.
She did not.
Sinking tens of millions of dollars into two vanity projects (a movie for her last album and this Spider Woman musical) also feels like someone trying to prove to everyone that she’s as good as she thinks she is, when she simply is not. I can’t tell what the dividing line is between confidently giving your best performance as the star and overconfidently showing your mediocrity with the spotlight firmly on you, but whatever that line is, she was on the wrong side of it during every dance sequence in Spider Woman. It feels like Jennifer Lopez has a lot of people surrounding her who tell her she’s great at everything she does, so she keeps doing more. I wish there was just one person to hold her hand gently and say, “mama…this ain’t it.”
And remember, this ego is all built on a career that was handed to her by Tommy Mottola to stick it to his ex-wife, Mariah Carey. More than anyone else, JLo’s career has existed under a thin whisper of industry plant because she has an early catalogue built on other people’s voices and other people’s songs. Aside from Christina Milian and Ashanti, there’s “If I Gave Love” by Chante Moore, which was going to be a single until it popped up in another version on JLo’s album.
And just before Mariah Carey’s breakdown that almost saw her end up with the same guardianship fate as Britney Spears, she had contracted to use a sample for “Loverboy” a full month before Tommy Mottola swooped in and decided to use the same sample for JLo’s upcoming album.
But is my perception of her ego and attitude based in reality or is there an undercurrent of misogyny inherent in discussions about a beautiful woman, traditionally past her prime, who continues to put herself out there? I haven’t sat with the thought long enough to make a firm decision, but I’m a fan of yesterday’s divas. JLo is 56, but I saw Janet on tour at 55 years old. I’m eagerly awaiting Madonna’s follow up to Confessions on a Dancefloor and she’s 67. When Madonna appeared in Evita, I felt like she worked so hard to not only get that role but to do it as much justice as she possibly could. Madonna, with a string of movie flops, pulled out a performance that won her a Golden Globe, and whatever that film did to her voice has stayed with her since, to the point where her early albums almost sound like a different singer. When I caught snippets of the press run for The Kiss of the Spider Woman it was as though JLo felt like she was owed a movie musical and it was unfathomable that she hadn’t been in one before.
I do think the public’s current turn against her is based on her personal life though, which is indeed rooted in misogyny. Anytime a woman in entertainment “can’t keep a man” it forms a foundation of criticism that men never have to worry about. There must be something wrong with her if she can never make a relationship work and we’ve seen that press cycle apply itself over and over to everyone from Halle Berry to Taylor Swift. Jennifer Lopez was a mediocre singer and dancer when we were all singing “I’m still Jenny from the Block,” but the difference is she’s now mediocre with a string of failed relationships behind her.
When the dust settles from this most recent high-profile flop (and I do mean flop because I’m in New York City and I was the only person in the theater when I went to see it), I’m still rooting for her. I have no plans to buy a concert ticket, because I like singers who sing or dancers who dance, but if she would just take a little break from the spotlight, re-center herself and pick some good projects, I’ll be the first one in line to see catch her next Hustlers or On the 6…
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