The world loves watching Spider-Man. That’s a fact born out over two decades and $11billion at the box office. But after a stunning run of spin-off flops focused on Peter Parker’s scariest and slimiest arch enemies (from the much-memed Morbius to Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s critically eviscerated Kraven The Hunter), you’d have expected his Hollywood paymasters to take a feather duster to the wider web of Spidey projects. And yet here we are, multiple episodes into Spider-Noir – a campy art-deco TV detective version of the wallcrawler’s adventures, starring Nicolas Cage.
He plays Ben Reilly, AKA The Spider. Adapted from the comics and possessed of his usual abilities to stick to buildings and swing through the streets, this friendly neighbourhood gumshoe has a slightly remixed origin story. Firstly, we’re in Depression-era New York. And secondly, instead of failing to save his beloved uncle from thugs, it’s girlfriend Ruby who meets her end, leading our fedora-sporting webhead to pack away his homemade supersuit (a woolly black ski mask and goggles) for good. Except, maybe it’s not totally for good.
Five years later, when his reliably humdrum existence as a down-at-heel PI looking for clues at the bottom of a whiskey bottle gets threatened by gangsters, Reilly takes up the case with renewed (and, once again, super-powered) zeal. What follows is a chaotic dash across the city and through its smoky cabaret clubs, gloomy dockyards and shadowy halls of power.
The plot isn’t really important to Spider-Noir though. It’s more about getting Cage to a place where he can cut loose. And boy, does he. His Reilly is sarcastic, bitingly witty and often silly, calling people names like “syphilitic walrus”. Mid-fistfight with hired goons, he’ll pause to make a joke. It’s a bit like if Jim Carrey’s Mask turned up stoned in Chinatown, but with the happy-go-lucky charm of ’90s Superman-at-teatime series Lois & Clark. It shouldn’t work, but it does – and that’s mainly because of Cage.
Also enjoyable are snarky but loyal secretary Janet, played by Karen Rodriguez, and the impeccably dressed newspaperman Robbie (New Girl’s Lamorne Morris). Then there’s Silvermane (an extremely Irish Brendan Gleeson), the scheming mob kingpin at the centre of a pivotal conspiracy. Most of the show’s violent moments come via Silvermane and his henchman attacking Reilly – and even if the dodgy action stunts are a bit Robert De Niro in The Irishman (Cage is 62, after all), there’s still enough blood and gore to make it unsuitable for children. You won’t notice as much unless you flick your settings to “True-Hue Full Color” though, because the default offering is “Authentic Black & White” – a gimmick aimed at what audience, it’s unclear.
In the end, Spider-Noir may face an uphill battle for ratings – how much crossover do the modern Marvel blockbuster and pre-war crime fiction fandoms have? – but there’s a lot of fun to be had here. Much more than with any other recent Spider-Man spin-off, that’s for sure.
‘Spider-Noir’ premieres on Prime Video on May 27