Spider Noir TV Show
Quick Review: Spider-Noir: Ben Reilly (Nic Cage) is the investigator who gets embroiled in a case involving a beautiful, exotic woman (Li Jun Li as lounge singer Cat Hardy). This intersects in mysterious ways with a corrupt crook-boss (Brendan Gleeson as the cruel Silvermane) and all of it is laid out in a 1930's background of Depression-era city squalor.
The upside on Spider-Noir is that it has an interesting take on the "private detective who can't meet his bills" story plus the twist that he is secretly a superhero, though one who has tried to bury that identity due to a tragic backstory.
The "noir" in the title is a legit way to describe the overall packaging of the show. In the first episode we get glimpses of what's already happened to our main character, and then the dangerous workings of the criminals. We watch a competing detective (Cameron Britton as Donegal) who can't see the danger-signals like our hero Reilly (and us) can. There's also some clear-cut superhero activity but draped with a sense of urgency to keep such things underwraps and out of the view of the general public.
This just adds more tension into the life of our hero who has a loyal but complaining secretary working for him who hasn't been paid for a very long time (Karen Rodriguez as Janet Ruiz). Plus, he can't stop thinking about his own tragic past while a list is growing of people who either want him dead or at least badly mangled. Cage provides a voice-over narration in sections of the tale that is helpful and is an old staple of noir films of the black-and-white Hollywood past, and there's an argument that the black and white version of Spider-Noir is more dramatic and pleasing than the color version that is also provided via streaming as an alternative.
The downside on this tale is the abundant CGI background work and the failure to establish a 1930's era completely. The dialogue and conversation is 2026, not 1932+, and there's the same old drab color palette that haunts modern film in general (presumably to better hide how the CGI is merged into the presence of the real humans being photographed).
There's an obvious (Sony) Marvel Comics sensibility to the proceedings, which isn't a plus or a negative, and as far as the first episode is concerned, there's a lot of great visuals provided. The writers sometimes have a nice piece of dialogue but in general the story works to fill us in on our character "types" and to push the plot forward without bogging down on anything, maybe out of a concern that a hero wearing a big and thick overcoat just looks too sedentary compared to our usual expectations for muscular men and women in tights.
Is Spider-Noir "real noir"? So far, it's certainly a nicely done comic book superhero version of noir, which means it reduces down the superhero aspects and fits it together with the somewhat cliché noir look and attitude. Nic Cage has his own way of making a character work onscreen, and that actually has no problem folding into the usual noir detective mold smoothly. Whether the writers have the gumption to carry on through with noir detective ethics is a question for later episodes.
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Original page June 29, 2026