‘Spider-Noir’ review: Spinning wheels, not webs

Spider-Noir wants to be a Bogart movie. Sometimes it remembers to try.

More specifically, there’s a moment in the second episode of Spider-Noir where Ben Reilly sits across from Cat Hardy. She leans forward and tells him: “You’re an investigator. Investigate.” It’s the classic sort of line that’s supposed to feel like a slap and a dare all at once. It’s the old-fashioned image of a femme fatale putting a man on assignment in his own life. The whole show wants to live in that exchange. The whole show wants every scene to be that scene.

Sadly, the whole show is not that scene. But before we get to where Spider-Noir falters, let’s give it credit for the ambition. Because the ambition is real, and in 2026, real ambition inside a Marvel IP container should be graded on a curve so steep it needs a city citation.

The setup.

Spider-Noir is an eight-episode Prime Video / MGM+ live-action series starring Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly. It centers around an aging private investigator in 1930s New York who once operated as the city’s only superhero, called The Spider. That is until a woman he loved named Ruby died, and he hung up the mask and crawled inside a bottle.

Five years later, the city’s choking under mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson, having a marvelous time), people with strange powers are starting to surface, and a nightclub singer named Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li, Sinners) is about to walk into Reilly’s office with a missing-persons case that will pull him back into a world he buried.

This is essentially a Spider-Man show without Spider-Man. The protagonist is Ben Reilly instead of Peter Parker. The hero name is The Spider instead of Spider-Man. Even the canon aphorism is inverted — “with no power comes no responsibility” — and the show means it as a thesis, not a tagline.

The Lord/Miller/Pascal team behind Into the Spider-Verse developed the show with Fleabag‘s Harry Bradbeer directing the first two episodes. Cage himself describes his performance as 70% Bogart, 30% Bugs Bunny, with the entire interior architecture built on the premise that Ben Reilly is a spider learning to perform humanity rather than a human grappling with a spider grafted inside him.

What Spider-Noir tries to do in eight episodes.

The trick Spider-Noir tries to pull is something like a magic act with three rings going at once. Ring one: a faithful 1930s detective story, with shadows and venetian blinds and rain-soaked alleys and a hero who has organized his entire life around not feeling a feeling.

Ring two: a Cage performance vehicle, where every line reading is a small experiment in how off-kilter you can make a leading man before the audience refuses to follow him. Ring three: a superhero origin story told backwards. A man who already had the powers, lost the reason for using them, and has to be coaxed back into the suit by a world that keeps insisting it needs him.

The pilot earns the ambition, sure enough. It moves with confidence and refuses to put The Spider on screen for much of the early goings. Which means you spend about 40 minutes watching a man drink, take bad cases, blow leads, and lose money in a coat that has seen better decades.

The “great power, great responsibility” reframe — Ruby said it, Ruby died, the line is poisoned now — is the kind of structural inversion that makes you sit up. Cage’s slow-blink Bogart bewilderment throughout is almost worth the subscription.

And the Bradbeer fingerprint is everywhere. The camera often holds a beat too long. Silence breathes naturally. Cat Hardy’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” set piece in the first episode is sensual, melancholy, mythologically saturated, willing to let a song do narrative work that lesser shows would assign to a flashback montage.

And then…

We get to episode four, and the magic act starts to wobble.

The plot does that thing where the season has six episodes of story and eight episodes of runtime. And you can feel the writers’ room billowing material outward to fill the gap. Subplots multiply. A second tier of villains gets introduced before the first tier has paid off. Cat Hardy’s motivations reshuffle twice. Reilly’s headaches — the show’s chosen physical manifestation of his returning powers — get used so often as a scene transition that they stop reading as character and start reading as syntax.

The episodic structure works against the long mystery. And the long mystery works against the episodic structure. So in other words, the show keeps trying to have both, and the result is a season that breathes hard around the middle. Cage stays committed throughout, the supporting cast (Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson is the secret weapon, the conscience and comic relief in equal measure) holds the floor. Gleeson chews scenery. But the writing keeps reaching for surprises it already promised, often finding them just out of grasp.

There’s also a craft problem underneath the runtime problem. Noir is the most compressed of genres. It runs on style as story, after all. The rain is the plot, the shadows are the character. Stretch noir across eight television hours and you have to keep generating new aesthetic information, or else the style starts to read as mannerism. Spider-Noir finds new territory to grip only about half the time.

The black-and-white question.

The show is available to watch in either full color or a “black-and-white” version. So, which should you choose?

That’s an easy one. Watch it in black and white. This isn’t even a stylistic preference, this is the show. The team clearly shot for black and white with intention, treating the color version as a parallel SKU for younger viewers. And you can feel the difference within seconds.

In black and white, the 1930s production design is the world. In color, the 1930s production design is a prop costume. The B&W version has the texture of a film that has been waiting eighty years to be seen. While the color version has the texture of a streaming show that knows it cost a lot to make.

The bottom line.

Spider-Noir is one of those shows that is much more interesting to think about than to binge. The first three episodes are genuinely thrilling. They’re a real swing at making period genre television inside a superhero container, with a Cage performance that justifies the whole exercise. Plus a directorial pedigree that elevates every frame. It’s just a shame the middle of the season doesn’t have more of an impact.

What lingers, though, is the sheer audacity of this thing. The willingness to make a Spider-Man show that avoids the familiar Peter Parker emotional engine is a great choice. Because it asks what a different engine — disillusionment, grief, a man who has already had his Chinatown moment — might pull.

Most superhero television these days is still trying to figure out how to be itself in the post-MCU-saturation marketplace. Spider-Noir has at least decided what it wants to be, warts and all. The fact that it can’t always reach what it’s reaching for is the price of shooting that web in the first place.

All eight episodes of Spider-Noir are available to stream now on Prime Video.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video.