Warning: Here be spoilers
I walked out of Spyder sick to the stomach in a number of ways. It took me a while to process my reaction and realize that I had a problem with a lot of things, only some of which are about the film itself. In order to talk about this, I will have to reveal some spoilers, so if you have a problem with this, please stop reading right now. But if you are going to watch the film, please, for the love of God, don’t take your kids to see it. You’ll understand why when you see it.
So, here goes.
The hero works for the intelligence bureau, in an illegal wire tapping division that has been set up for the public good. He decides to use this to eavesdrop on a bunch of private conversations and plays vigilante. Or to be more precise, he stops crimes before they occur after having listened to phone conversations that involve the perpetrators discussing the crime beforehand.
One night, he eavesdrops on a conversation between two medical college students. One of them talks about how she stumbled upon some porn and ended up watching it for four straight hours, and now needs to get laid. So obviously he decides to go meet this girl. After a bit of stalking, they end up as friends with benefits. (I am not going to describe the scene where they have a conversation about this with the hero’s mum.)
Am I the only one who finds this plot thread problematic? Why have a (ahem) romantic subplot at all in a film about a vigilante phone tapper on the hunt for a serial killer? And if you do feel compelled to have one due to commercial considerations or whatever, could you please, pretty please with sugar on top, go easy on the whatthefuckery?
The serial killer plot, though, has some interesting aspects. There’s a pretty interesting origin story there: he is born in a crematorium, and needs to hear the wails of people mourning the loss of their loved ones in order to feel alive. So at some point he becomes a serial killer himself. SJ Suryaah plays the villain with such palpable relish that he walks away with much of the film.
But here’s my problem, and this is not with the film but with something peripheral. I walked out to the loo at the interval, sometime after this origin story was told, and noticed that the hall had a whole bunch of parents who had brought their kids. I’m not talking about teenagers, I’m talking about eight year olds and the like. And I realized that the aforementioned whatthefuckery in the film couldn’t even hold a candle to this.
My first reaction was, why on earth would you bring your kids to this. I understand that you don’t want them to stick to talking animals until they go to college, but come on! Then I realized that the film got a U/A certificate, which means that, if you’re under 12, parental guidance is advised. So if this certification is how a filmgoer decides whether or not to take his kids, then the certification process as well as how it is enforced needs fixing.
I’m not talking about censorship here, just the idea that if a film has content that is only suitable for mature audiences, the certifying body has a responsibility to inform filmgoers of this, and the theatres screening the film have a responsibility to ensure that kids don’t get in.
Why is this so difficult?
Honestly, I found it difficult to care about the rest of the film after this.