Spider Noir: Nicolas Cage's Big Bet

 

Watching William Butcher smash Homelander’s head in the finale of The Boys felt a lot like watching Batman kick Superman’s ass. We’d already seen that before. What we hadn’t seen was offering a blowjob in exchange for staying alive. Next comic based series, please. Prime again? Yes, this is not Disney+.

The noir treatment isn’t unexplored territory in comics. Frank Miller worked it with Daredevil in the early 80s, then with Batman in the mid 80s, and later with Sin City in the 90s. Robert Rodríguez brought that same recipe to the big screen with the 2005 adaptation of Sin City. Anyone who’s been paying attention to the last forty years of pop culture already knows where Spider Noir is headed. But there’s a fundamental difference. While Miller and Rodríguez delivered noir straight up and without detours, Spider Noir uses Nicolas Cage as the gravitational center of something far more ambitious. A universe that simultaneously breathes the air of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney movies, the comics of The Shadow, The Spider, and Dick Tracy, the cartoons of Bugs Bunny and Roger Rabbit, and the manic energy of Jim Carrey’s The Mask.

Cage is an actor with a uniquely dynamic range. Almost kamikaze. Being unpredictable is one of his greatest virtues. He can be uncomfortably intense or eerily atmospheric, and sometimes both at the same time, giving his characters multiple psychological layers that few actors can sustain. Something has changed in him over time. His self-awareness has grown. His maturity as an actor can no longer be contained in ninety minutes of big screen runtime. If Bryan Cranston could go from Hal Wilkerson to Walter White across five seasons and sixty two episodes of Breaking Bad and become a legend, what Cage could do in that same format is an incredibly exciting prospect.

Streaming series have become something very different from what they used to be. Before, movie actors looked down on the small screen as second division. The big names of the silver screen didn’t want to be there, and television actors had little chance of crossing over. The great stories, great directors, and great actors were reserved for cinema. Today, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Black Mirror, or Atlanta have shown that every episode of a series can be as artistic, creative, and ambitious as a movie. Cage knows this. And that’s exactly what shines through in Spider Noir.

A character who is half man and half spider. A man who is half Humphrey Bogart and half Spider Man, half hard boiled detective and half superhero, with an atmosphere that blends the aesthetics of Orson Welles cinema with the rawness of Raymond Chandler’s pulp fiction. A combination that has no reason to work on paper and yet sparks intense curiosity. Cage knows how to turn a character into something impactful and unforgettable. His obsession with the superhero world is well known: he’s played Superman, Ghost Rider, Big Daddy, and now Spider Noir. Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, and Halle Berry, make room for the king.

It’s not that I’m generally excited about superhero series. Fierce satires like

The Boys or Watchmen are something else with their anti heroes. Daredevil could have been truly great, but Disney didn’t go all in on the character. With Spider Noir, it feels like they’re making a serious big bet. A bet that includes Nicolas Cage as the lead is no small thing.

I have to confess that the Spider-Man stories against Silvermane, Kingpin, Hammerhead, Tombstone, and The Rose were always my favorites. That gang war in New York, straight out of Martin Scorsese’s imagination, was what hooked me the most as a kid. And the noir treatment Frank Miller gave to Daredevil is something I’ve never been able to forget. Cage has a huge advantage: he’s as magnetic as Ben Reilly as he is as Spider Noir. The series builds a dual dynamic with the character swinging through Depression era New York by day and sinking into the mafia underworld by night. The impact of two protagonists in one. The power of two stories in one. Cage’s ability to develop two striking characters in a single performance.

For some, Cage is already too old to play a superhero. That’s precisely Spider Noir’s secret weapon. Ben Reilly isn’t the teenage Peter Parker. He’s a middle aged man who wakes up with back pain, ends up with sore knees after climbing stairs, and retired from superhero life five years ago. That closeness to Frank Miller’s retired and aging Batman in The Dark Knight Returns borders on the sublime.

Spider Noir is Marvel stepping out of the box and moving away from its comfort zone. That’s also Cage’s specialty, stepping away from the big screen to keep growing in a new format for him. It’s a risky experiment. And there’s no better way to take that risk than with an actor who’s afraid of nothing.