Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the final episode of “Spider Noir” season 1, which is available on Prime Video.
“Spider Noir” is unlike any superhero story we’ve ever experienced.
A film noir/superhero hybrid shot in stunning black and white, “Spider Noir” follows grizzled private investigator Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage) in Depression-era New York City. Ben Reilly retires from his crime-fighting alter ego, Spider, following the death of his wife. Joined by fellow journo Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris), Ben is back in action to capture nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Lee Jun Lee) and solve a labyrinthine case involving Irish crime lord Finn Burne/Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) and a team of World War I veterans imbued with special powers. At the center of it all is Cage, one of Hollywood’s most unusual and unpredictable stars, chewing through the scenery of “Spider Noir” like bubblegum. As Cage recently told Variety, he’s “channeling old actors and colliding them with Stan Lee’s classic Spider-Man to create a kind of Roy Lichtenstein pop-art feel.”
All eight episodes of the Oren Uziel-produced series were released on Prime Video on May 27 (and earlier on MGM+). Its finale, “The Man Wearing the Mask,” is a cinematic piece that combines elements of “Star Wars,” “Spider-Man,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” and even “Casablanca.”
We witness Finn’s confrontation with a Mexican in a nightclub and a bit of misdirection in which Robbie poses as a spider, and then we learn that Ben was the one who took Flint/Sandman (Jack Huston), Ronnie/Tombstone (Abraham Popoola), and Dirk/Megawatt (Andrew Lewis Caldwell) from a World War I prisoner of war camp, where they were experimented on and given powers. In a sequence reminiscent of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, Cat enters the Hall of Mirrors and ultimately gets the best of Silvermane, shooting him dead.
According to Cage, “The Lady from Shanghai is very obvious. I also love Enter the Dragon and the Hall of Mirrors sequence at the end. It’s all borrowed from Welles.”
There’s also a thrilling set-piece in which Cage’s Spider confronts both Sandman and Megawatt and, after being mortally wounded (a la Return of the Jedi), throws the villain into an oncoming train. In his first television role, Cage initially found it difficult to adapt to the rhythm and movement of the medium, as well as working with so many different directors on one project.
“What’s different about TV, where I’m a student and I want to learn things, is that the cinematographer uses stand-ins to set up the shots, and they don’t really have time to rehearse. They have to take the shots. So as an actor, I have to find a way to arrive at shots that make sense for my character,” he explains. “In movies, you bring the actors in and you and the director all sit down and talk it over, but that’s not the case with TV because of time constraints. It was a bit of a learning curve. In the first episode, it was like, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What is this? ! ‘It’s a little more factory-like, so I’ll have to adjust it. ”
Cage continued, “The other big difference is, obviously, in step with the director, we have a new director coming in after two episodes. So you wonder, ‘Are we going to gel?'” “Here’s my rhythm, what’s your rhythm?” What they do is they bring in the next director and they watch them for a few weeks and talk to them and get to know them. And I was blessed. Because each director had something different to offer and there was a great creative collaboration happening. ”
Cat Hardy (Lee Jun Lee) in “Spider Noir”.
Provided by Prime Video
Finally, Ben does a selfless act and leaves the woman he is infatuated with (Kat) and gives Sandman an antidote that cures Sandman’s superpowers, allowing him and Kat to live a happy life together. This is a perfectly logical bogey move for Cage.
“I think Ben Reilly knows it’s no use. Kat doesn’t love him. It’s as simple as that,” he says. “Am I going to be a guy who keeps chasing people he’s not interested in? No. Is it selfless or just being real and letting her go? He wanted to forget about it and put it away. He feels like he failed at the love of his life. Because here he is with power. And what good is he if he couldn’t save his beloved, Ruby? But he has a higher calling, and he owns it.”
“Spider Noir” ends with Ben and his loyal secretary Janet Lewis (Karen Rodriguez) establishing a private eye practice together. So will there be more mysterious cases for the duo (and Robbie) to solve in the upcoming season?
“I don’t know,” Cage says. “But whether that happens or not, I think we’ll accomplish what we all set out to do and it will work automatically. Let’s see what happens.”
