At Least Nicolas Cage Is Having Fun

Whether it’s in Adaptation or Bangkok Dangerous, Nicolas Cage has never been one to phone in a performance. So it says something about Spider-Noir that every time his private eye dons the mask as the Spider, whereupon his blocky frame is noticeably swapped for a svelte digital counterpart web-slinging over the skyline and the actor shifts from physical acting to voice-over, it’s hard not to detect a going-through-the-motions quality in the quips he’s delivering as this 1930s variant of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Cage isn’t boring to watch here — he’s never boring — but the rest of the eight-episode MGM+/Prime Video series around him certainly is.

In his first major television role, Cage plays Ben Reilly, a World War I veteran turned hard-luck gumshoe who also happens to be a retired masked vigilante with the usual spider-adjacent powers. This isn’t quite the same character Cage voiced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a black-and-white, trench-coat-wearing, Nazi-punching Peter Parker who was deployed more as a gag than anything else. Nor is he connected to the brooding himbo Ben Reilly, voiced by Andy Samberg in the latter of those films (though the association is amusing considering Samberg once did a dead-on Cage impression on Saturday Night Live). Instead, this Spider-Noir stands separate from any larger Spider-Manosphere — at least for now; let’s not forget how much Marvel loves a good multiverse — pitching itself as a detective noir in the style of old-timey serials that happens to feature a superhero.

Showrunner Oren Uziel, whose credits include 22 Jump Street and The Cloverfield Paradox, approaches this premise by hurling noir clichés and superhero clichés into the same sack and shaking vigorously until everything becomes a blur of familiar shapes. Reilly is a down-on-his-luck PI struggling to keep the lights on for his wisecracking receptionist Janet (Karen Rodriguez). He retired his Spider persona after the death of his lover, meaning the series’ central dramatic engine is, naturally, trauma. All of this arrives via a graceless opening-exposition dump that bulldozes through the first four minutes before the plot finally lurches into motion, bringing in an Irish mobster named Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), a femme fatale named Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), plus some war veterans who were experimented on and now roam 1930s New Yawk with superpowers. Together with Janet and intrepid reporter Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris), a fixture of the extended Spider-Man universe, Reilly has to figure out how to stop the city from spinning out of control.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are EPs on the show, have co-signed Cage’s description of Spider-Noir as “70 percent Humphrey Bogart and 30 percent Bugs Bunny,” but it’s really 100 percent Bugs: trench coats, cigars, Dutch angles on Dutch angles, Myahhhhhhh, see? Myahhhhhhh. There’s potential fun to be had with that exaggerated cartooniness, but the series attacks the aesthetic with such sweaty desperation that it became hard for me not to think of Spider-Noir as the film the Tim Robinson character was trying to make in the 1,000 plastic meatballs sketch. At one point, some random mobster growls, “Anybody coulda told ya that was a doozy,” and the line tracks like a writer underlining “THIS IS NOIR” in thick black marker.

The production’s most baffling gimmick, releasing both a black-and-white version and a “True-Hue Full Color” edition, only deepens the sense of overcompensation. Neither cut looks particularly good. The monochrome version turns shadows into muddy soup, while the color version seems chiefly designed to emphasize the high-pop color costuming that recalls the 1990 Warren Beatty Dick Tracy adaptation. The exaggerated visual design is presumably meant to foreground the show’s comic-book artificiality, but mostly it raises the question: Who exactly is this for?

Cage is pretty much the only thing that works in Spider-Noir, and he almost makes the whole thing worth it. His Easter Island statue face has only grown more interesting with time; to look at it now is to observe something geological. His God-given inability to behave normally onscreen, paired with a physicality that has always suggested a tight-shouldered alien performing an interpretation of a human being, makes him weirdly ideal casting for a guy with spider abilities. There’s a wonderful small moment midway through the season where Reilly’s lightly bugging out in his dingy apartment, shaking out his limbs at sharp, insectile angles to get comfortable. Spider-Noir leans into a broad comedic sensibility, which never feels as effective as you want it to be, but hearing Cage’s peculiar intonation, simultaneously monotonous and mellifluous, utter lines like “Well, well, well, if it ain’t Mr. Whiskers, searching for some cheese” does occasionally nudge toward the genuinely sublime.

Spider-Noir is the sole survivor of a development cluster that sprung up around Lord and Miller’s fantastic Spider-Verse movies, which were tailor-made to inspire all sorts of Spider-spinoffs given just how many iterations of the beloved Marvel hero it could cram into a frame. Sony struck a deal with the duo and spent years trying to spin that Spider-Verse momentum into a constellation of projects, including the now-dead Silk: Spider Society live-action series from Walking Dead alum Angela Kang, but most faded in development hell. Despite reports suggesting that Sony clashed with Lord and Miller over the budget, this one made it over the finish line, and it does ultimately feel like something that was compromised into a less interesting version of itself. Every so often, you glimpse the ghost of a stranger, more inspired show, as in a flashback sequence depicting how Reilly got his Spidey powers that briefly veers into body-horror territory, hinting at a version of Spider-Noir that could’ve embraced actual grotesquerie.

Look, at this point, I’m not entirely certain what I want from Spider-Man as a cinematic or television project. Another Tom Holland installment is due in a few weeks, while the third Spider-Verse movie limps toward next year’s release on the exhausted backs of its animators. Looming over all is a broader malaise surrounding Marvel and superhero media in general. Is anyone genuinely excited for Doomsday? And really, how many Spider-Men do we need? What I do know is what I want from television: something that at least feels alive. Spider-Noir is a complete drag for so much of its run time, but it borders on watchable almost entirely because of Cage. Is it worthy of his first television leading role? Of course, that’s a trick question. Cage, perhaps our most magical living actor, has built a career defined as much by sheer volume as by prestige. Alongside genuine classics sits a mountain of direct-to-video and streaming detritus, making any debate over whether a project is “beneath” him a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of his oeuvre. Spider-Noir is just another disposable exercise in IP maintenance, but in the end, it’s best remembered as one more stop on the endlessly fascinating Nic Cage train before it barrels onto the next destination.