Spider-Man Noir couldn’t help stand out in the colorful world of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and, however briefly, its 2023 sequel. A full-blown spin-off—with Nicolas Cage, who voiced the character in the animated features, reprising the role in live action—would seem like an invitation to get even more cutely meta, maybe with that tried-and-true (yet now quite tired) device of letting some emphatic color sneak into a monochrome world.
Partly that’s because the series is available in two different viewing formats: “authentic” black-and-white and what developer Oren Uziel describes as “true hue” full color. But Spider-Noir never undercuts its sense of atmosphere with a knowing wink, and it never alludes to a larger multiverse with crossovers and spin-offs waiting in the wings. For eight episodes, the series is every inch an earnest noir pastiche, blissfully content to let a game cast ham it up under high-contrast lighting against a backdrop of Depression-era New York.
Technically, our protagonist—Ben Reilly, a P.I. who gave up working as web-slinging vigilante the Spider when his wife died five years ago—is a different character than in the films. He tries to lead a regular life, no matter how much nakedly expositional prodding he gets from his reporter pal Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris) about how the city needs a hero. Unable to pay his phone bill, let alone his long-suffering secretary (Karen Rodriguez), Reilly takes a shady job that sends him careening between New York factions both legitimate and otherwise, with the rise of other super-powered individuals driving him to don the mask once more.
Cage constantly finds new depths to what might simply have been goofy impressions of Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and others. And he gets ample opportunity to go bigger and wilder as the series goes on, hilariously playing drunk in a standout bar brawl and trying out different voices whenever Reilly goes undercover. Sometimes the arachnid instincts win out, as in a scene where he’s bedridden from an injury and curls his limbs up in the air like a squashed spider.
That condition is meant to be the reason that Reilly talks in the Transatlantic squawk of an old-timey detective: Gaining superpowers left him feeling more spider than man, and he studied movies to cobble a personality back together. But it’s a somewhat unnecessary explanation since all the other actors are on a similar wavelength, making a meal of their hard-boiled archetypes: Brendan Gleeson chews the scenery as affable Irish mobster Silvermane, and Li Jun Li is a sultry standout as the requisite femme fatale, lounge singer Cat Hardy.
The show’s heightened theatricality ensures that style is the main attraction rather than big plot twists, complex fight scenes, or crowded effects sequences. The series looks great, particularly in its black-and-white version, where the distinct facial textures on villains like Sandman (Jack Huston) and Tombstone (Abraham Popoola) evoke Universal monsters. There are even a few clever, period-appropriate uses of superpowers, like when the electrically charged Megawatt (Andrew Lewis Caldwell) ducks into a phone booth so he can zap the Spider through the wires.
Sometimes the show’s old-school vibe doesn’t feel very old, as the editing rhythms are decidedly modern, with lots of cutting between close-ups. But the confident simplicity and charm that Spider-Noir radiates makes it relatively easy to ignore that incongruity, as well as some rather flimsy plotting and fuzzy character motivations. And even if it didn’t, the way the series makes raucous hay of Cage’s most eccentric instincts certainly does.
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