New York, 1933. Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage), aka The Spider, has given up the good fight. Soon, though, the fight comes for him…
Streaming on: Prime Video
Episodes viewed: 8 of 8
In his New York office, private investigator Ben Reilly — wholly inhabited by Nicolas Cage — receives a client who believes his wife is cheating on him. The supposed cuckold is in the advanced stages of middle-age, and a stout fellow at that. Not a looker. So much so that when he hands Reilly a photo of his very beautiful, much younger partner, the droll gumshoe double-takes. “You a rich man?” inquires Reilly, indelicately trying to make sense of it. Later, having learnt more about the woman in question, Reilly comments to his secretary, “The only thing I can say with any certainty is that she isn’t married to that syphilitic walrus.”
Spider-Noir contains multitudes. Set in 1933, it is film noir with a keen wit and a sharp bite, its lead character (played, we must again stress, by Nicolas Cage) a variation on Spider-Man — except Reilly is more Humphrey Bogart than Peter Parker, lobbing out sardonic put-downs instead of friendly-neighbourhood wisecracks. It is an absurdly brilliant, brilliantly absurd concoction, on paper a ridiculous idea but in execution, genius. It is uncompromisingly hard-boiled, rattling along with rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, wall-to-wall with private dicks, shady dames and super-villains. And if you’re a fan of Nicolas Cage losing his shit, oh boy.
This isn’t the Spider-Man Noir from the comics, or the one from the animated Spider-Verse films, which Cage voiced; it takes its cue from all that, but then runs — and runs, and runs — with it. Here, he is The Spider, possessed of all the arachnid advantages we’ve come to expect, but when we find him in 1933, he’s hung up his woolly mask, scarred by his failure to save the life of his girlfriend five years earlier. Instead, he’s thrown himself into his PI work, although that soon involves run-ins with a motley crew of super-powered undesirables, all borrowed from the comics, and all here connected to the non-powered but very powerful mobster running New York’s underbelly: the snarling, cigar-chomping Silvermane (a particularly Irish Brendan Gleeson, providing genuine menace). Some ugly, brutal gangster violence goes down with this guy. It ain’t for kids.
It just gets better and better, with a finale that delivers on every level.
The show really is none more noir, shot in the most gorgeous black-and-white, although it was simultaneously filmed in colour for philistines who might want that option. In monochrome, this New York is as romantic as it is dangerous. Blinding-white sheets of rain blast onto the streets. Sunlight smashes through Art Deco windows. Frames are painted by cigarette smoke. There is high-contrast lighting and rich shadow-play, accenting the themes: just as duality is a mainstay in noir, so it is here. Ben Reilly/The Spider provides that in (Sam) spades, and this show never met a mirror it didn’t like.
What makes it truly noir, though, is the sad heart pumping through it. Reilly is classically nihilistic. Still, his abandonment of costumed heroism doesn’t last too long, and let’s just say that from the start, it’s hard to deny the simple thrill of seeing Nicolas Cage web-sling his way around a skyscraper. The actor is having the time of his life here, munching on the scenery like he hasn’t eaten in weeks: he resists delivering conservative line-readings at the best of times, and this show lets him run amok. One morning, when Reilly is still drunk, and hungover, he says, “I need scrambled eggs, sausages… and… a biscuit,” like he’s simultaneously caressing and mocking the English language. A sequence in which he is finding his way with his powers again, contorting his limbs, clicking his bones, is maximum kabuki. Elsewhere, Cage’s facial expression, as Reilly stumbles while trying to improv some Latin, is a facial expression quite possibly never seen before.
It’s a miracle that all of this works so well together. And it is full of surprises: one later episode, outstandingly titled ‘Nightmare On A Gurney’, serves up hallucinatory, Buñuelian stuff, going psychologically and biologically deeper than any other Spider-Man outing has. It just gets better and better, with a rug-pulling season finale that delivers on every level, with Nicolas Cage in the middle of it all, fulfilling a lifelong dream he possibly didn’t know he had, with every pore of his body, every restless, fizzy atom of his being.
A big swing — oh, yes — that pays off from start to finish, this is an irresistible concoction, an utterly insane stew that somehow makes perfect sense. It is total joy.
