Spider-Noir
Created by Oren Uziel
Do you like cheesy Nicolas Cage?
Spider-Noir is an eight-episode miniseries on Amazon Prime Video. It is set in an alternate universe within the Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise. (That’s a quote from the Wikipedia page.)
What you think of it will probably depend on a lot on what you think of Nicolas Cage. I understand there are people who think Cage is a unique talent. Rumor has it that Nicolas Cage is one of those people1. I am not.
Cage plays Ben Reilly, a private detective in depression and prohibition-era New York. Ben got his spider powers in World War I after an encounter with some men being experimented on by Germans. (This sounds more like World War II than I to me, but historical accuracy is not what we’re going for here.) The principle villain is a crime boss called Silvermane (Finbar “Finn” Byrne), who feels a lot to me like the more familiar Kingpin.
The first word that came to my mind to describe Cage’s performance was “cheesy.” I had to think about it a bit to figure out what I meant by that. And I think it is this: Cage is not pretending to be a 1930s era detective. He is pretending to be an actor portraying a 1930s detective in the movies. That is, there is a an extra layer of artificiality in Cage’s performance. This is deliberate, as eventually becomes clear.
Some of that same extra artificiality shows up in other aspects of Cage’s performance. Occasionally Ben Reilly moves in what Cage apparently believes to be a spider-like way. This was especially cheesy.
Well, I did not love it. I didn’t hate it, either. Overall I enjoyed it.