Bringing a fan favorite Spider-Man to life (in both lush color and stark black and white), SPIDER-NOIR is a plunge into the storytelling of yesteryear, packed with fantastic acting and a great story. What more do you need, see?
SPOILER WARNING: IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED SPIDER-NOIR
ON PRIME VIDEO, GO WATCH IT NOW AND COME BACK HERE.
Five years ago, The Spider (Nicolas Cage) put aside his mask and stopped being New York City’s only superhero. Private detective Ben Reilly had lost his fiancée Ruby (Amanda Schull) to an enemy’s murder attempt. Heartbroken, he sank into booze and indifference such that his business is on the verge of closing. Only the heroic forbearance of his secretary Janet Ruiz (Karen Rodriguez) has kept the lights on; the phone, on the other hand…
Turns out Ben is more than burned out. Wracked with guilt at failing to save Ruby, he doesn’t want his powers or the responsibility that comes with them. (Hold on to that thought.)
Reilly gets an offer from a guy named Carmedy (Brian Howe) to follow his wife, lounge singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), and see if she’s being unfaithful. He follows her to a hotel and what looks like a tryst with New York’s Mayor Morris (Michael Kostroff), who’s struggling with reelection.
Before he knows it, a simple job lands him in trouble with Finn Byrne aka Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), the crime boss of the city, whose home was just burned down by a man with burning hands. Reilly and a competing detective, Donegal (Cameron Britton), track the arsonist, Addison (Jack Mikesell), to an oil farm where Donegal shoots and kills him. But that starts Silvermane thinking—there might be some superhumans out there he could hire for his criminal business. So he starts looking.
Right away, Silvermane discovers that his employee Flint Marko (Jack Huston), who he set to watch over Cat (since he’s the secret owner of her club, The Alcove), has strange powers of his own… and Marko knows another, Lonnie Lincoln (Abraham Popoola). How did they get their powers—and why are these two in a photo of WWI vets with the dead man, Addison?
Along the way, we get a look at how Ben got his powers. Serving in France in WWI, he liberated a German prisoner of war camp, only to find that scientists had been conducting strange and terrible experiments on the prisoners. Bitten by a man mutated by spider DNA, Ben found himself desperately ill, confused… and imbued with spider-powers. He’s spent years since then dealing with atavism (spider instincts) and struggling to stay as human as he can. It ain’t been easy.
Back in the “now” of the 1930s, Reilly is hired by Winston (Lukas Haas) to find who paid to burn down Silvermane’s home and ruin his booze shipment. He finds out that a prime suspect—Marko—is in love with Cat, but he ran off when his powers started to go out of control. Marko finds his old friend Lincoln just as cops arrive to break up a Hooverville and scatter the homeless.
Their brush with the cops is captured on film by Joseph “Robby” Robertson (Lamorne Morris), a former reporter with the Daily Bugle, Ben’s best friend, and one of the few who knows Reilly was The Spider. Robby was investigating the dead arsonist Addison, but this story about Marko and Lincoln falls into his lap and he makes the most of it.
It causes a citywide sensation/panic when the two men are dubbed “monsters” stopped by “heroic” cops. Robertson is infuriated about the blatant lie and confronts the paper’s weaselly editor-in-chief about it. He gets his job back but isn’t happy about it.
Reilly goes to talk with Cat directly. They find each other intriguing and Reilly’s perpetual misery begins to lift, even as events drag him back into being The Spider once again. (There’s a truly hilarious scene where he has to intrude on a couple in his old apartment to recover his gear.) And when the connection between all of these superpowered men surfaces—and Reilly’s role in it—things start to get very personal.
And matters only get more complicated when Reilly finds out why these men have suddenly manifested powers. They were all patients of Faber, an obsessed doctor (Amy Aquino) who seeks to cure her assistant Ogden (Andrew Robinson) of his own mutation—and she believes Reilly, as the only stable mutation of the whole bunch, has what she needs. Cat realizes that Dr. Faber is Marko’s best chance… so she makes a fateful deal, damning herself with good intentions.
As the stakes rise, with Silvermane setting himself against the Mayor and The Spider facing the mob boss’s super-thugs, Reilly is going to have to figure out who’s playing who and how to keep his friends safe as the city rips apart at the seams.
SPIDER-NOIR, developed by Oren Uziel, is a terrific bit of dark-as-coal film noir with superhumans. If that sounds unlikely, well, you’d have to watch to see how they pull it off. Cage is absolutely amazing as Ben Reilly, the alcoholic ex-hero whose past isn’t staying buried; his knack for physicality is brilliantly used here, as Reilly’s spider DNA causes him to twitch and spasm uncontrollably. And of course, there’s the webswinging. Cage brings a 1930s down-and-out cool to Reilly, his way of speaking stolen from the movies of the time (for a reason); he brings The Spider out of the Spiderverse (where he originated the character) and into live action in style.
Li Jun Li isn’t only stunning as Cat Hardy, she’s a formidable femme fatale whose loyalties remain in doubt (in true noir fashion) and keeps the audience guessing. Her portrayal is a great callback to noir classics. If life is fair, she has many great roles ahead of her.
Lamorne Morris as Robby and Karen Rodriguez as Janet Ruiz are Ben’s loyal, reliable friends, keeping him afloat even as he’s drowning in booze and guilt at not saving Ruby’s life. Though they do heroic things, they aren’t superheroes themselves. And they’re Ben’s living connection to his own humanity, giving him a reason to fight for the city that’s stopped believing in him. We need more characters like these in our superhero stories—and we need actors like Morris and Rodriguez to bring them to life.
But what would a hero be without a worthy villain or two? (Or more?) The main bad guy is Silvermane, aka Finn Byrne, who has had a field day without The Spider getting in his way. Surviving his home burning down, he puts Reilly on the trail of whoever hired Addison to do the job and then tipped off the cops about a shipment of illegal Canadian booze… and he’s not entirely fooled when Reilly steers suspicion to a vicious (but innocent) underling. Gleeson does a terrific job as an amiable, homicidal beast to whom the fight for power, money, and influence is more important than the spoils he wins.
Huston impresses as Marko, a man whose mutation causes him to doubt Cat’s love. His powers are escalating but they’re also killing him as they escape his control; he wants to live a normal life but that is only slipping further away and Huston (whose chemistry with Li is superb) emphasizes the tragedy of his situation.
Ditto Popoola, who makes Lonnie Lincoln into an icon of taciturn dignity, struggling to hide his anguish at changing into something inhuman—his skin becomes stone hard, multiplying his strength but making his appearance freakish—and his scenes with Morris and Huston in particular are fantastic. This is definitely an actor to watch.
And then there’s the grandiose actor/subway train operator Dirk Leyden, played by Andrew Lewis Caldwell. A motormouth given to quoting lines from plays, he’s a sadist who enjoys using his electric powers to kill anyone in his path. Caldwell makes him a truly singular combination, a formidable threat who’s also slightly ridiculous, and his portrayal lingers after his climactic fight with The Spider.
Over the course of eight episodes, viewers will get the chance to watch in full color (and boy do those colors pop) or in noir-traditional black and white (which is beautiful on its own merits). My suggestion is watch in black and white, then go back and watch again—both are rewarding experiences.
A season 2 is possible, depending on how this series does, but it hasn’t been renewed yet. Jump in now, watch this amazing show, and enjoy this variation on Spider-Man like we’ve never seen before.
Rating: A
Level of Enthusiasm: 99%
