‘Spider-Noir’ Review
The Bulwark · C · trust 39/100
Nicolas Cage playing a PI Spider-Man: What more could you want?
Sonny Bunch July 31 Upgrade to listen 6 minutes 32 11 4 Nicolas Cage in Spider-Noir . (Courtesy Prime Video) Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about to blow the roof off the box office, proving once again that there’s nothing quite as valuable as the goofy webslinger from Queens. It is more or less as review-proof as a movie can get: You’re going to see it, or you aren’t, so what do you need my opinion for? 1 But if you’re holding off a week to avoid crowds or get better seats—or maybe you’re seeing The Odyssey this week as audiences flood to see Peter Parker’s latest adventure—and still desire some hot spider action, allow me to suggest staying in and checking out Spider-Noir on Prime Video. I can sell it to you in one sentence: Nicolas Cage plays a private eye who is also Spider-Man.
Or maybe not: As I noted a few years back in an essay titled “ The Nicolas Cage Paradox ,” Cage’s very name is both a selling point for studios looking to make a quick buck on streaming and a warning for folks who have been burned too many times by middling fare. All I can say is that Ben Reilly is the role the comic book-loving actor has waited his whole career to sink his teeth into, allowing him to deliver the sort of performance over eight episodes that demonstrates a breadth of influences. Yes, yes: comic books and all that. But also Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. And, on top of that, creature feature horror flicks that range from classic monster movies like Them! (1954) to David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly (1986).
It’s a comic book–inflected, body-horror noir informed by the world-destroying wreckage of World War I and the bleakness of a post-nuclear age, and Cage wears every one of those influences right on his face.
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When the show begins, Cage’s Ben Reilly 2 is a private eye struggling to keep the phone ringing and the lights on in a New York City headed toward economic collapse in the 1930s. He’s also the Spider, a masked hero who fought the city’s criminal element, though he has been retired for some time following the tragic death of his fiancée at the hands of one of the criminals he had caught. But the Spider is forced out of retirement thanks to a tough case involving crime boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), femme fatale lounge singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), and a series of foes whose superpowers are leading them into an early grave.
Showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot have crafted an intricate, though not overly complex, mystery here, one with all the traditional noirish hallmarks: Needless to say, the Spider’s own powers are connected to these mysterious newcomers, and figuring out precisely how is key to solving the whole puzzle. There are double crosses and crooked cops and tough-talking hoodlums and street urchins looking for a buck. Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris) is a freelance journalist looking to work his way back into the good graces of the Daily Bugle ; he’s also black, giving the show (and his pal, Reilly) an entrée into the world of not-quite-integrated New York City.
Nicolas Cage and Li Jun Li in Spider-Noir . (Courtesy Prime Video) The show’s a stylistic treat, all Dutch angles and smoky rooms, though you have a choice to make: Do you want to watch it in black and white, like the films from which it draws inspiration, or “True-Hue Full Color,” a sort of saturated, Technicolor-mimicking tint. The show was always intended for black and white, but my sense is someone at Amazon got cold feet , see, and they panicked, right? Couldn’t handle the heat that would come with making a black-and-white show for modern audiences, yeah, that’s the ticket. I went with the black and white myself, but I’m old-school like that; kids today, they need their crayons and their markers, so why not give it to them good and bright.
There’s substance, too: It’s a show that’s deeply concerned about the appeal of populism in a broken society, one with a populace uncertain and on the edge. Silvermane is more than just a mob boss; he’s a political power broker, working the mayor for his benefit. (That these two occupations merge more often than we might like is at least part of the show’s resonance for us in 2026.)
All that said, Cage is the reason to watch this. It’s not just that he’s clearly having the time of his life; this is a man, after all, who nearly played Superman and made two Ghost Rider movies before superhero movies had become a sure thing. More importantly, it’s the sort of show that plays perfectly into his weirdly idiosyncratic twitchiness. The sort of show where Nicolas Cage pretends to be a spider with its legs curled up into its abdomen and you may currently be envisioning what that means—you’ve seen a dead spider before, after all—yet you simply cannot quite prepare yourself for what that actually looks like onscreen. Again, there’s a very strong element of body horror here, of a man losing control not only of his emotions but his actual physical state.
And there are, quite simply, very few actors who are better equipped to embody that sort of disembodiedness than Nicolas Cage.
I’d review it anyway—I know you actually do yearn for my opinion!—but I have a conflict so I have to sit this one out, as I sat out the previous entry in the series.
Cage originated a version of this role in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , but you don’t have to have seen that animated movie to watch the new series.
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