The issues—the numerous, distracting, annoying issues—with Prime Video’s new Spider-Man series Spider-Noir are almost all helpfully contained within its posters. Beneath images of a masked vigilante in a trench coat and fedora, they each assert, with passion, if not necessarily good grammar, that “Nicolas Cage is Spider-Noir.” Some of the irritation is built into the title, which sets expectations for exactly what Spider-Noir delivers: An awkward attempt to smoosh together superhero quippyness with classic-Hollywood cosplay, forcing otherwise good actors to try to rattle off clunky lines about “superpowers” in their most adequate approximation of Humphrey Bogart. But the real problem, surprisingly enough, comes even earlier in the tagline—because this is a TV show with a profoundly bad case of “Nicolas Cage is.”
The living legend’s first starring TV gig sees him slip into the flat feet of retired superhero Ben Reilly, a.k.a. The Spider—who, Prime’s marketing people would like to remind you, is a separate and legally distinct entity from any other Spider-Men based off of 2009 comic series Spider-Man: Noir that you might have previously seen or heard Cage play. A down-on-his-luck private investigator living in a New York constructed almost entirely out of clichés, Reilly comes with a full complement of his own: A sassy secretary (Karen Rodriguez), a reporter buddy (Lamorne Morris, maybe the only performer who comes out of this thing fully unscathed), and a backstory that comes helpfully pre-Gwen Stacy’d for all your instant “mournful superhero” needs.
Into this pile of comic book and private eye stock types barges Cage, giving a performance of such manifest strangeness that the show has to work in an explanation for it almost halfway through its eight-episode run. That caveat—that Reilly is so spider-brained by his imported arachnid genes that he’s essentially had to cobble together a human being impression out of old movie dialogue—could be interesting in a darker show. Here, though, it mostly just gives Cage license to completely give himself over to his most indulgent tendencies. In a career that’s seen the actor wrestle with any number of odd mannerisms, it’s quasi-tragic to see a few finally manage to pin him; the result is so twitchy that you’d be forgiven for thinking Reilly hadn’t been bitten by a spider so much as a rampaging collection of tics.
That leaves Spider-Noir as a show that frequently seems to be working around its star as much as with him—whether that means sticking a stuntman in The Spider’s low-rent superhero suit for fight scenes (while having Cage contribute some genuinely terrible ADR quip work), or moving heaven and earth to try to convince the viewer he has chemistry with resident femme fatale Li Jun Li. Their out-of-place romance, more than any other element, highlights the way Reilly feels like he was written to be no older than a spry 50 instead of Cage’s lumbering 62.
There are moments when the fabled Cage spark actually shows up, but they’re few and far between. They typically occur when the show either indulges its grimmer impulses—as it does in its best episode, which namechecks Tod Browning’s Freaks in a successful effort to set a distinct tone for itself—or when it lets its more slapstick side out to play. (Cage has noted in interviews that he’s worked at least a little Bugs Bunny into the gumshoe gumbo; it’s visible, if you squint.) The rest of the time, though, Reilly’s just an oddity, the misbegotten result of stretching a funny animated vocal performance into the purported shape of an actual human being.
But Cage is, at least, divertingly weird, which is more than can be said for most of Spider-Noir’s plot and characters. The series is a dinner theater take on any five noir stories you might name that’s then suffered the indignity of having a bunch of Spidey supervillains shoved in at the margins. There’s the flinty mob boss (Brendan Gleeson), the even more flinty—because he’s a sand monster—enforcer (Jack Huston), and corrupt politicians and police captains to spare, all glumly alternating between pointing sarcastic asides and guns at each other as the story demands. And each and every one of them feels like they’ve been bound up in an Improv 101 understanding of what noir is and sounds like, trapped in an endless sequence of bad TV impressions of significantly better films. Even an old hand like Gleeson can’t quite escape the orbit; his gangster boss Silvermane occasionally flirts with depth (as does Li’s riff on classic Spider-flame Black Cat), but he’s building on such a shaky foundation of scripts, forcing him to flip between vile and avuncular on a whim, that he can never construct anything firm. Again, only Morris manages to totally walk the tightrope: Despite being laden with some of the show’s most overt superhero moralizing, his newsman Robbie Robertson consistently makes his dialogue feel natural, instead of mannered.
The tragedy of Spider-Noir, then, is that showrunner Oren Uziel clearly has an affection for at least one of the genres his show hybridizes, filling the series with shots and camera tricks lifted straight out of classic detective flicks. (The superhero material feels far more perfunctory, not to mention cheap—whether you’re watching in the original black-and-white it was shot in, or the version that’s been digitally colored after the fact.) But even those bright spots reveal themselves to be largely surface-level: Another set of clever impressions that dress themselves in the messy murk of film noir without actually giving in to the darkness. Doomed romances lay limply on the screen; references to social issues rise to namecheck status and then dissipate; characters seemingly exist because they’re signifiers of the genre. (Would you believe there’s a wisemouthed newsie with a heart of gold and a weasley crime thug with a special axe to grind against our hero? The Spider’s outfit isn’t the only thing here that feels like it was taken straight off the rack.) There’s simply no ugly, beating, broken heart to the thing, because the guy who’s supposed to be providing it is too busy contorting his arms like a bug man while doing his best James Cagney.
That, in the long run, is the real harm inflicted on Spider-Noir by Cage’s performance-by-imitation approach: It robs the series of the chance to ever be anything more than a simple pastiche with some clumsy comic book theming stapled onto it. Despite efforts to paint Ben as a darker, more careless Spider-Man—including multiple mentions that all he really wants in life is for “no power” to mean “no responsibility”—the viewer is left with little sense of what drives him beyond whatever they’re able to glean from Cage’s introductory voiceover. The best you can say about Spider-Noir is that it’s a noble, but ultimately failed experiment. Its lead clearly set out to create a character who didn’t feel entirely like a human being; what he got was one that never really feels like a person.
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