‘Spider-Noir’ Review: Nicolas Cage’s Brooding Detective Marvel Is Stylish, Tangled, And Impossible To Look Away From
A retired Spider reinvents himself as a world-weary private detective in 1930s Manhattan, where mob wars and femmes fatales slowly drag him back into costume. Prime Video.
Closer in spirit to the grim, rain-soaked Batman of The Dark Knight — or the recent The Penguin — Spider-Noir transplants an alternative version of the classic Marvel character into something that feels, as the title promises, ripped straight from a 1930s and ’40s Hollywood detective picture. No longer a superhero — he was one once, but that’s behind him — Ben Reilly (not Peter Parker here, though that’s a story for another time) is now a private eye. He belongs to the world of Dick Tracy, Perry Mason, the detective Jack Nicholson played in Chinatown, the weary investigators Humphrey Bogart made iconic: a far cry from the wisecracking teenager swinging through Manhattan.
Aesthetically impeccable and anchored by a dominant, if slightly more restrained than usual, Nicolas Cage, Spider-Noir hooks you immediately through sheer atmosphere — a near-textbook love letter to the visual grammar of noir. And like those old films it so lovingly homages, the plot grows considerably more tangled than it strictly needs to be, sprawling across eight episodes. Yet even when the web of betrayals, double-crosses, duplicate femmes fatales, and overlapping cases starts to blur, the show never loses its allure — or at the very least, its distinctiveness.
It also carries a wildcard that becomes increasingly central in the back half of the season: this is, at its core, a superhero show wearing a detective story’s trench coat. Corrupt officials, dangerous mob bosses, and romantic deceptions fill the foreground, but sooner or later the mutations and the mayhem they bring will come crashing through the door. The open question is whether Reilly will choose to put the suit back on — he swore off being The Spider after a tragedy he couldn’t prevent and couldn’t forgive himself for.
Created by Oren Uziel, Spider-Noir unfolds in an alternate universe separate from the Disney-controlled Marvel timeline (this is a Sony production based on a 2009 comic). Reilly is a big man worn down by decades of fighting crime and absorbing personal losses. His office takes few cases, and he turns down most of those — much to the exasperation of his secretary Janet (a delightful Karen Rodriguez). His one remaining tie to his aerial past is Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris), a journalist doing his best to lure him back into the game. But between infidelity cases and political corruption, Ben gets derailed the way detectives in these stories always do: by a woman. Her name is Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), she sings in a nightclub, she leaves him speechless, and she pulls him into a case he can’t walk away from.
The broader plot entangles itself in a three-way conflict between local mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), the city’s political machine — led by Mayor Alfred Morris (Michael Kostroff) — and the growing emergence of individuals with extraordinary abilities threatening Manhattan: one bursts into flames, another hardens like stone, and a bodyguard named Flint Marko (Jack Huston) will be instantly recognizable to anyone versed in Marvel lore. Whether they’re superheroes, supervillains, or meta-humans, their arrival — along with more personal pressures — will eventually push Ben back into the spider suit.
Prime Video offers the series in both color and black-and-white. Having sampled both, the black-and-white version wins without contest: it’s the one that truly connects to the visual imagination of 1930s noir, the period in which the story is set, and it lends the show an elegance and melancholy that carries it through even its most convoluted stretches. The cinematographer is the same one behind Perry Mason, and it shows — the color version is no embarrassment either, but the monochrome is where Spider-Noir fully becomes itself: a stylish, nostalgic ode to the private detective who risks everything for a woman who may yet break his heart.
And then there’s Cage — magnetic, idiosyncratic, impossible to look away from even when, particularly in a handful of scenes where he erupts into full-throttle screaming, you’re not entirely sure what he thinks he’s doing. The show gives him ample opportunity to stretch: since Reilly frequently goes undercover as other people, Cage treats each disguise as a chance to try on a different mode of performance entirely, as though playing Ben were itself an acting exercise. It helps, presumably, that beneath the mask, it’s probably not him doing the action sequences. But even when Spider-Noir gets lost in its own eccentric reinvention of the genre, Cage ensures it’s always worth watching.
