Nearly 30 years after he was supposed to play Superman in a Tim Burton-directed feature about the Man of Steel (and three years after he cameoed as the character in The Flash), Nicolas Cage finally gets his long-overdue extended superhero spotlight in Amazon’s Spider-Noir.
The resulting series, which doubles as Cage’s most substantial television work to date, is a disappointment. Or, more specifically, an inconsistent disappointment, because over its eight-episode first season — the door is left open for more adventures, but it lacks a cliffhanger to force the issue — one can easily imagine the entertaining 100-minute movie yearning to be chiseled out.
Spider-Noir
The Bottom Line
If you’re gonna watch, watch in black and white.
Airdate: Monday, May 25 (MGM+), and Wednesday, May 27 (Amazon)
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, Karen Rodriguez, Abraham Popoola, Jack Huston, Brendan Gleeson
Creator: Oren Uziel
Spider-Noir has a great cast and some very good performances, especially Cage in the second half of the season when he’s finally allowed to start being fully weird. Plus the black-and-white cinematography from Darran Tiernan and Peter Deming is worthy of notice (and, as will be discussed later, debate), but any eight-episode series in which one could easily skip three or four episodes entirely — episodes two through four, if you’re curious — isn’t telling its story optimally.
Created for TV by Oren Uziel, the story of Spider-Noir is frustratingly dull, cribbing the barest of bones from various vintage gumshoe dramas — the series is much more Spider-Hard-Boiled than Spider-Noir, if we’re being totally honest — and adding precious little, despite the obvious deviations that come from having a Sam Spade capable of shooting spider-goo from his veins.
Cage plays Ben Reilly, a gumshoe struggling to remain afloat in New York City in the Great Depression. Haunted by his experiences in the First World War — do not attempt the math to figure out how old the series thinks Nicolas Cage is — and by the death of his beloved Ruby, Ben isn’t even making enough to pay his devoted assistant, Janet (Karen Rodriguez).
Because of something that happened to him during the war, Ben has your typical Spider-Man powers. Prior to Ruby’s death, he’d been locally beloved as the vigilante hero, The Spider. But Ben put aside his fedora and his trench coat — The Spider’s not hugely distinctive costume — and now his spidey sense mostly tingles when somebody is about to knock at the door, making him about as special as a Ring security system.
One seemingly thankless gig leads Ben to a brief interaction with a young man who has unlikely powers of his own. Another thankless gig leads Ben to Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), a nightclub singer with ties to Brendan Gleeson‘s Silvermane, a vicious mobster engaged in an increasingly heated conflict with the city’s mayor (Michael Kostroff).
Soon, Ben, Janet and Ben’s journalist bestie Robbie (Lamorne Morris) are enmeshed in escalating drama involving Silvermane, Cat, Silvermane’s mysterious right-hand Flint Marko (Jack Huston) and a superpowered conspiracy so twisty (but not really) that it may require the return of The Spider.
At some point, reflecting on the mayor, Ben observes, “I still don’t know if he’s a Republican or a Democrat.”
On one hand, Ben is cynically referring to the way that corruption can often trump ideology when it comes to politics.
On the other hand, the statement is emblematic of the uninteresting vagueness of Spider-Noir‘s world-building. As fans of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — the two properties are NOT narratively connected, Amazon wants me to emphasize — can already guess, Spider-Noir exists in an alternate universe, but fans looking for a contemplative approach to this unique version of early 20th-century Manhattan can skip the series entirely.
The number of times, watching Spider-Noir, that I thought “Huh, that’s an interesting idea and approach” about something other than Cage was literally zero.
What does it mean, in this period and this universe, for the series to have a Black journalist as a key character? Nothing. What does it mean, in this period and this universe, that the story has an Asian femme fatale? Nothing. The series doesn’t even have the depth of one of the puddles that pop up frequently because puddles look great in black and white and rain is a great excuse to have as many characters as possible wearing trench coats and fedoras.
This would be as good a place as any to discuss the cinematography, which Amazon is offering to viewers in either “Authentic Black & White” or “True-Hue Full Color.” This is, at the very least, irritating.
Either the series’ cinematographers and directors (Harry Bradbeer, Nzingha Stewart, Alethea Jones and Greg Yaitanes) conceived of, framed and optimized the show in black and white as an homage to the noir (or hard-boiled) films it’s emulating or they didn’t. If they did, it makes no sense to think that swapping to digitally augmented color, and a look with no evident inspirations or antecedents, would make any aesthetic or thematic sense. And if they didn’t, it makes no sense to think that just gray-scaling the image would count as an homage. Or, put a different way, any cinematography optimized simultaneously for both color AND black and white hasn’t really been optimized for anything.
I watched the eight episodes in black and white, because that was where the series’ visual style felt purposeful, from the dark and shadow-filled alleys to the way cigarette smoke wafts around characters to the impeccable coronas of light around Cat when she takes the stage. The series’ overall look is very derivative — not just when it’s directly aping The Maltese Falcon or The Lady From Shanghai — but, especially in the action sequences and several flashbacks and hallucinations in the later episodes, it’s mostly pretty and occasionally striking.
I watched the pilot, plus a few later selected sequences, in color and found that version’s overall look to be generally confusing and actively ugly in showcasing special effects, though Morris’ Robbie has a burnt umber suit in the pilot that came across far better in color than monochrome. That suit, incidentally, offered the only indication I could see that the show was shot to accentuate or acknowledge both looks.
Watch the series in black and white. The opening credit sequence, set to Kirby’s endearingly 007-esque “Saving Grace,” is color-free regardless.
After the cinematography, the most polarizing aspect of Spider-Noir is likely to be Cage, who sleeps through the first half of the series for reasons that are probably justifiably character-based. After scattering his trademark eccentricities sparingly to that point, the fifth episode is when Cage starts to go full Nicolas Cage and it becomes possible to understand why his interpretation, subtly to that point and then very overtly, was a blending of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. The arachnid aspects of the character begin to bleed through into his physicality, and what Cage is doing suddenly borders on modern dance. A drunken fight scene in the seventh episode is like pure, uncut Nicolas Cage, and as much as I know some viewers will probably hate that transition, it’s a shot of bizarre adrenaline to an otherwise meandering and lackadaisical show.
In the sleepier portions, Morris and Rodriguez are left to deliver straight-shooting energy, and Janet and Robbie become the show’s most likable characters. At the same time, neither character gives the impression of existing at all when they aren’t dealing with Spider-based problems. Janet wants to feed her off-screen family. Robbie wants a job. Silvermane wants power, but nothing he does is worthy of an actor as good as Gleeson, whose craggy, world-worn visage was made for the black and white version of the show. This show and Gleeson both deserve more than a role lifted from a Generic Irish Gangster template.
The thinness of the writing limits several crucial actors. Li is magnificently photographed throughout and is as alluring as the part demands, but Cat has no evident personality — nor does Flint, leaving Huston playing emotionally tortured but with no meaningful underpinnings. Huston played effectively the same character in Boardwalk Empire, only he was tremendous there and here he is not.
The bigger supporting performances end up being the most memorable, be it the commanding presence Abraham Popoola brings to his looming Lonnie Lincoln or something more aggressively irritating like Andrew Lewis Caldwell’s very theatrical Dirk Leydon.
The odd and outlandish performances in Spider-Noir offer a reminder that this is a comic book series and it ought to be fun. Periodically, Spider-Noir is, indeed, a hoot. It’s too bad you have to wade through so much nondescript storytelling to get there.
