Spider-Noir Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Spider-Noir looks stunning and fully commits to its smoky black-and-white detective style, with Nicolas Cage bringing the perfect mix of mystery, exhaustion, and old-school charisma to the role. The atmosphere and visual ambition carry the series even when the story becomes uneven.
It may not reinvent superhero television, but for fans of noir thrillers and darker comic-book storytelling, Spider-Noir is stylish, strange, and consistently watchable.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Platform: Prime Video
Language: English
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Brendan Gleeson, Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, Karen Rodriguez
Showrunner: Oren Uziel
Nobody asked for this. That is the first thing worth saying about Spider-Noir. Nobody sat down and wrote a letter to Marvel requesting a black-and-white, Depression-era, hard-boiled detective show starring a middle-aged, burnt-out version of Spider-Man played by Nicolas Cage. It was not on anyone’s wish list. And yet here it is — easily one of the most original, confident, and genuinely entertaining things to arrive in the superhero space in several years.
The show is set in 1930s New York, deep in the Depression, where the city runs on cigarette smoke, bad luck, and the kind of moral ambiguity that makes everyone look guilty of something. Ben Reilly — played by Cage — was once The Spider, a masked figure who kept the city safe. He stopped five years ago, after he failed to save the woman he loved. Now he runs a private investigation business that is barely staying afloat, assisted by his sharp and indispensable secretary Janet, played by Karen Rodriguez, and his reporter friend Robbie Robertson, played by Lamorne Morris. When a nightclub singer named Cat Hardy, played by Li Jun Li, hires him for a job, Reilly gets pulled back into a world of hidden abilities, organised crime, and the kind of conspiracy that makes a man reconsider whether his mask might still have some use left in it.
The setup is classic noir. What makes Spider-Noir special is what it builds inside that setup.
Nicolas Cage is, in a word, transcendent. This is the kind of role that was designed for exactly his kind of talent — heightened, stylised, committed to an almost absurd degree, and somehow completely believable within the world the show creates. He adopts a period-appropriate Transatlantic accent and holds it throughout. He goes full theatrical when the scene asks for it and genuinely quiet when the scene needs that instead. There is a moment where a character tries to run a scientific experiment on him and Cage curls up on a table like a dead spider — deadpan, committed, perfect — and it is the funniest thing you will see in a superhero production all year. He is having the time of his life, and that energy is infectious.
He is not working alone. Brendan Gleeson plays the villain Silvermane with the kind of cheerful menace that only truly experienced actors can pull off — scary not because he shouts or threatens, but because he is so calm about everything terrible he does. Lamorne Morris steals every scene he appears in as Robbie Robertson, and Karen Rodriguez as Janet is one of the most enjoyable supporting characters the Marvel universe has produced in recent memory. The ensemble works because everyone is playing the same genre at the same pitch, and that collective commitment gives the show a consistency that most superhero productions struggle to maintain.
The visual approach is worth discussing on its own. The show was filmed in colour and then converted to black and white, but crucially it is available in both versions — the original monochrome and what the creators call True-Hue colour. Both work. The black and white is the intended experience and the more atmospherically correct one, but the colour version is genuinely beautiful and creates a different feeling entirely. It is one of the rare cases where watching a show twice in different formats would actually be worth your time.
The tone balances comedy and darkness with real skill. There are laugh-out-loud moments throughout, but the violence is handled with the same seriousness you might find in a prestige crime drama. This is not a show for very young children despite the Spider-Man branding, but for anyone old enough to appreciate a smartly made genre piece, it is enormously satisfying.
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If the superhero genre has felt exhausted and formulaic to you lately — and there are very good reasons it might — Spider-Noir is the direct counter-argument. It proves that the material still has life in it when someone approaches it with genuine creative ambition and the willingness to make something that does not look like everything else.
Cage. Gleeson. Black and white. A woolly Spider-Man mask. Prime Video. Watch it immediately.
Spider-Noir is now streaming on Prime Video.