Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow Parent Guide

Inspector Sun (Ronny Chieng) is a huntsman spider with a successful past as a detective. In this animated film-noir-style whodunnit, Sun and his sidekick Janey (Emily Kleimo), a jumping spider, investigate the murder of Dr. Spindlethorp (Scott Geer), a funnel web spider-scientist who is killed on a trans-Pacific flight from Shanghai to San Francisco. The main suspect? Spindlethorpe’s new bride, the black widow spider Arabella Killtop (Jennifer Childs Greer).

I want to structure this review as a compliment sandwich because there are innocent people who worked on this movie.

Here’s the first compliment: I really liked the sets and costuming, if that’s what you call those in the CGI world.

Here’s the criticism: I have no idea how it got so far into production without someone saying, “Why is this still so bad?”

Y’all, this movie was a draggy, confusing mess. My 9-year-old took breaks from watching it to play with the seat recliner button or ask how long I thought it took them to build the theater. She also pointed out that the title referred to a curse that never surfaced in the story.

The story! The story was all over the place. Inspector Sun was totally disinterested in the investigation, but also never quite caught up with his kid sidekick. I do want to give the writing team the benefit of the doubt, since the movie was originally written and voice-acted in Spanish and I was watching an English dubbed version.

But then crimes started overlapping crimes like scalloped potatoes until I had to ask my nine-year-old to explain what was going on.

“You missed that part where the bad guy escaped because you were knitting,” she whispered.

“But how did he escape the first time?” I said.

“Oh, they didn’t explain that,” she said, calmly eating a handful of popcorn.

Part of what made Jim Henson’s projects so successful was his assumption that kids were sophisticated. (RIP Jim, the Muppets have suffered lately, especially since the Mouse booted Frank Oz from the team.) This movie seems to make the opposite assumption: that kids won’t notice if things don’t make sense.

Believe me, they notice. As a content advisory, they will also notice when a bug gets distended and explodes, and when another superbug villain kills a dog in the luggage hold of the plane.

Here’s my last compliment in the compliment sandwich. This story had potential. I mean, listen to the premise! This could’ve been a great little movie with a diverse cast and a neat film-noir feel, highlighting the intersection between the world of insects and ours.

Instead, we got…this.