Nicolas Cage's Goofball Energy Will Make You Stick It Out With 'Spider-Noir' The Series

(SPOT.ph) In Spider-Noir, Nicolas Cage plays Ben Reilly, a down-on-his-luck private detective struggling to make ends meet as he jumps from one dead end case after another. He also happens to have superpowers: he can climb walls, shoot webs, and sense when danger is coming. And he uses these powers as his masked alter-ego The Spider. When the show starts, though, he is a few years into retirement from his masked vigilante days, having quit following a tragedy that continues to haunt him.

The show is quick to show that Reilly has a heart of gold, though like the noir detectives that precede him, he’s also willing to tread deeper into the shadows than the average hero. He barely hesitates when presented the opportunity to blackmail someone, for example. The show takes its noir inspirations pretty seriously, painting out a world where people are tortured and killed at the whim of some powerful overlord. Reilly, as our hero, has to get his hands dirty in order to continue to operate within this shadowy world. 

The series is a fascinating gamble. For as much as the character Spider-Noir made an impression in the first Spider-Verse movie, a full series set in the thirties referencing the pop culture of the era doesn’t at all seem like a safe bet. To this end, the show hedges a bit by offering episodes in both black-and-white and color, offering a branch of accessibility to anyone unwilling to sit through a monochrome presentation. Either way, the show looks pretty good, though in comparing the two, there is some sense that these scenes were really designed to be in black-and-white.

There’s a lot of plot to follow in the first three episodes of the show, having Reilly chasing down various cases that don’t always lead somewhere. Much of it has to do with the fate of a man named Addison, who Reilly was contracted to find in the opening scenes of the series. This case has him traversing a web of intrigue that has him butting heads with the crimelord Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), femme fatale Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), and an emerging crew of superpowered beings. Life in the 1930s serves as the foundation of the story, with characters mentioning prohibition, and the displaced veterans of the first Great War.

The show doesn’t get particularly specific with historical detail, though. Instead, it treats the era as a pop culture playground, with an eye toward the movies that came out of that decade. Cage mainly plays Reilly like a Humphrey Bogart character, with a distinct defeated shabbiness that has him strolling into places where he’s clearly not meant to be. At the same time, there are scenes where he breaks out into an Edward G. Robinson impression. His scenes with his receptionist Janet have the ratatat rhythm of a screwball comedy. This show is anchored on Cage’s performance, and he is ultimately the main reason to see it. It’s the actor’s goofball energy that allows the show to be so many things, making it able to ride out plotting that can at times feel languid.

There’s certainly promise to Spider-Noir. There’s an interesting shift in perspective with a protagonist who already did the superhero thing and decided to give it up. The series can get cartoonish, but at its core it’s a story of a guy who’s seen too much tragedy to believe that his efforts, even as a superpowered vigilante, can do much to change the injustice inherent to the world. That’s a fairly new wrinkle in superhero media, even if it’s a sentiment that comes from decades ago. Cage’s Ben Reilly is a fascinating creation, and the actor makes all of it strange and fun.

Spider-Noir streams on Prime Video starting May 27. The first three episodes were provided for review.