Spider-Noir review – Nicolas Cage’s stylish take on the superhero as a 1940s detective is huge fun

All smoke, shady dames and black and white cinematography, Marvel’s latest Spidey offering is fast, witty and confident

As is increasingly, wearyingly, the case as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand/bloat/chase the dollar in an ever-more unseemly and less rewarding manner – delete according to taste – Prime Video’s new series, Spider-Noir, requires you to set aside some lore while retaining other bits. Thus I should point out that the arachno-inflected human being brought to you here is played by Nicolas Cage but is not the spider character that he played in 2018’s Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, although he sounds a lot alike. That one was called Peter Parker, as is traditional. This one’s called Ben Reilly. Why you would still cast one of the most divisively idiosyncratic performers in modern cinematic history – who can no more be dissociated from any of his previous parts by the average human brain than the concept of sourness can be uncoupled from a lemon, sweetness from honey, or Nigel Farage’s face from that of a melting frog’s – is beyond me, but I guess … that’s Hollywood?

As the title suggests, Spider-Noir has been conceived as a homage to the hard-boiled films and fictions of the 1940s. The whole thing was filmed in black and white and digitally colourised thereafter, so that viewers can choose in which form they want to watch it. I look forward to online wars breaking out over this issue, upon which I shall remain Switzerland. Except to say that the decision to colourise a noir homage was a craven one in the first place – never give the people what they want! – and the decision to watch such a version is worse.