Black and White, but Not Plain

Like most people who saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I was entertained by the parade of increasingly unusual parallel universe heroes. But did that mean I was clamoring for an eight-episode television spin-off about Spider-Noir, the film noir inspired character voiced by Nicolas Cage? Not really. And yet, that Spider-Verse movie itself had come at a time where there was no shortage of Spider-Man movies, when "no one had asked for this," and it had turned out to be really good. Could that history repeat itself with a new TV series?

Set in a crime-ridden 1930s New York, Spider-Noir follows private investigator Ben Reilly. Devastated by the loss of a loved one, he's hung up his superhero alter ego, The Spider. But when superpowered villains begin to terrorize the city, he must step up once again.

I'm sure I've blogged this many times -- so at the risk of repeating myself: I don't really care for film noir. I've watched a lot of the classic movies of the genre, and found only a couple that I enjoyed. Generally, I think they're too cliché, from the performative accents to the mandatory character archetypes to the formulaic plots. I was sure that's what I was in for Spider-Noir.

It turns out: I was, but in all the best ways. The developer and show runner of the series, Oren Uziel, clearly knows all the trappings of film noir -- and clearly loves them dearly. Well, no one can do parody quite like a person who deeply knows and loves the thing they're parodying. Spider-Noir isn't a straight-up Mel Brooks-style joke fest poking fun at a genre... but it is a show that knowingly turns the film noir cliches up to 11 and doesn't quite play everything straight.

And if you ask me, that's a perfect thing to fuse into the superhero genre. "Taking everything super-seriously" is about the only way a superhero movie or show gets made these days; even when the results are supposed to be a little funny and irreverent, they almost always turn serious for the big climax. But all the while, there's a fundamental over-the-topness to comics that edges oh-so-close to silly. And it turns out that for me, putting that together with the same qualities of film noir was like mixing peanut butter and chocolate.

Better still was casting Nicolas Cage in the lead role. This was, of course, no casting coup; Cage voiced the character for Into the Spider-Verse. But it's hardly a given that a man in his early 60s would be the smart choice to play a romantic lead and superhero on an action-adventure show. Here's where I confess that however skeptical I am of most film noir, I'm doubly so of a performance by Nicolas Cage. That's because I find him broad to the point of self-parody. But as I just covered, that is exactly the tone of Spider-Noir: it dances right along the line of making fun of itself, occasionally putting a toe on the other side of that line only to playfully drag it back. In that recipe, an over-the-top Nicolas Cage performance suddenly feels like exactly the right ingredient.

He's one "ingredient" among several in the cast that I think works great. Karen Rodriguez is fantastic as the takes-no-guff assistant to private investigator Ben Reilly. Lamorne Morris is quite funny as his reporter best friend. Filling the noir-required roles of the heavy and femme fatale are are a wonderfully menacing Brendan Gleeson and effectively alluring Li Jun Li. Those are just my favorites; the bench of superpowered villains are a lot of fun too.

In the end, much to my surprise, I quite loved Spider-Noir, and give it an A-. Two final notes on it. One, it's a perfectly packaged little mini-series, and I find myself hoping they don't actually try to make more. Two, you can view it either in full color or in moody and authentic black-and-white. I did the latter, only checking out a minute of how it looked in color when all was said and done. (Wrong, wrong, wrong. Don't do it.) Indeed, Spider-Noir may have set a bar high enough to make me enjoy this summer's Spider-Man movie a bit less.