Nicolas Cage Is 'More Spider Than Man' in Spider-Noir

Rating: 9/10 ⭐️

I have been a Nicolas Cage fan since I was nine years old, back when Face/Off and Con Air first showed me what he could do. He was a deliciously unhinged villain in Face/Off, and I loved every second of it.

I came to Spider-Noir with some history. I also already half-knew this character, because Cage voiced Spider-Man Noir in Into the Spider-Verse back in 2018.

That is a long way of saying I wanted to like this show before I pressed play. The real question going into it was how much Cagism I was going to get.

The answer turned out to be all of it, and in a form that makes sense. Ben Reilly, the man under the hat, is not fully human anymore. So the twitching, the odd pauses, the hands that never stop moving are not just Cage indulging himself, they are the character.

Everyone says watch it in black and white. Watch it in color.

Spider-Noir comes in two versions, Authentic Black and White and True-Hue Full Color. The internet consensus says watch it in black and white. I think that is wrong, and you should watch it in color, because color is the version that matches Cage's heightened, theatrical performance.

The case for black and white is real. It looks gorgeous, it honors the 1930s noir the show is built on, and most critics and fans land there. The monochrome version is beautiful in stills.

I should be honest about my bias. I grew up on color television, and black and white has never done much for me. I have watched a handful of classics that way and spent most of the runtime wishing I could see them in color.

So maybe I am the wrong noir purist for this. But this show in particular earns the color. The 1930s New York streets, the period clothing, the detail in the set pieces, all of it looks rich and deliberate in full color rather than drained to tasteful gray.

The color also matches the lead. Spider-Noir is not a sad, restrained noir, it is a pulpy, operatic one with Cage at full volume. The high-contrast lighting and the colors that pop off the screen are what keep up with him.

Black and white smooths his energy into something tasteful. Color lets it stay loud. If you are only watching once, watch in color and let the show be as big as its lead actor.

A real origin story, not another Uncle Ben

Most superhero origins ask you to sit through beats you already know by heart. Spider-Noir mostly skips them. It drops you into 1930s New York with Ben Reilly already a worn-down private investigator, already bitten, already grieving.

The backstory is its own thing, and worth getting right. This Ben Reilly is a World War I veteran who was bitten by a dying, spider-mutated prisoner while freeing soldiers from a German prison camp during the war.

He is not the comic-book Ben Reilly, the Peter Parker clone that longtime readers know. The series builds a self-contained myth, and it works better for never leaning on Peter Parker at all.

The noir detective structure helps with the part most origin stories fumble. By the time the spider bite matters, the show has already set Reilly up as a worn-down private investigator in 1930s New York. The powers arrive as part of a life already in progress, not as the whole point of him.

The Cagisms, all of them

If you keep a mental file of Cage tics, Spider-Noir checks every box. The sudden tonal lurches. The wide-eyed stillness that snaps into motion. The hands, always the hands, conducting some private orchestra while he talks.

He bursts into song when you least expect it, laughs through moments that are meant to be deadly serious, and narrates his own case in a running hardboiled voiceover. Richard Roeper counted Cage switching gears roughly 147 times, and that number feels about right.

His voice is the centerpiece. Cage called his take 70 percent Humphrey Bogart and 30 percent Bugs Bunny, though critics also caught James Cagney and a heavy pour of Edward G. Robinson's growl. What comes out is a hardboiled bark that keeps slipping into something cartoonish.

It should not work, and for long stretches it is the strangest, funniest thing on screen.

The line that justifies everything

Ben Reilly is, the way Cage plays him, more spider than man. Cage described his approach as a spider trying to cosplay as a human, code-switching to pass, learning how to behave by studying other people and old movies.

The casting is brilliant for exactly that reason. Cage has talked about deliberately building an arachnid physicality into the role, playing Ben as a creature first and a man second.

There is a scene in the fourth episode where he sits in a movie theater watching Cagney in Great Guy, mouthing the lines back like a man studying a language he was not born into.

For once, the Cagisms are not a detour from the story, they are the story.

Nine Out of Ten, and Most of It Is Cage

I would give Spider-Noir a nine out of ten. Most of that number is Cage, and the writing that gives him room to operate. The version of him that people clip and meme is the same version doing real character work here, and the show understands it.

It has me thinking the best Cage performances are not the unhinged ones people share out of context. They are the ones a script is actually built to require. Spider-Noir is one of those, and it is a good place to start if you want to see what a Cagism can do when a story earns it.

This is the first entry in a small series I am writing on the modes of Nicolas Cage. For the full map, start with the field guide: What's a Cagism? Nicolas Cage's Acting Style, Explained.