Random Review: Spider Noir - Nic Cage goes full NOIR | Original Geek

This week on Original Geek Random Review, Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw roll the dice and land in the smoky, shadowy world of Spider-Noir.

Nicolas Cage stars as Ben Reilly, a broken-down private investigator with a past life as The Spider, and somehow the whole thing works exactly because it lets Cage be Cage. We dig into the noir style, the Spider-Man twist, Janet as the show’s secret weapon, the midseason slowdown, and the brilliant reversal of the classic Spider-Man line: “With no power comes no responsibility.”

We also get into the show’s villain choices, the detective-story pacing, and why this version of Spider-Noir feels less like another superhero product and more like a strange little genre experiment that actually has a pulse.

Spoilers ahead for Spider-Noir Season 1.

Watch Spider-Noir on Prime Video, then come back and roll with us.

Watch, listen, argue with us, and tell us what you think.

Full episodes and more at:
OriginalGeekPodcast.com

Follow Original Geek Podcast:
Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Original Geek Podcast — where Gen X nostalgia, geek culture, and questionable dice rolls collide.

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

🔔 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube
🌐 originalgeekpodcast.com
📬 originalgeekpodcast@gmail.com
📱 @OriginalGeekPodcast on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook

🎙️ Original Geek — Gen X geek culture from people who lived it.
Hosted by Steve Scarfo and Jeff Shaw.

🔔 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube
🌐 originalgeekpodcast.com
📬 originalgeekpodcast@gmail.com
📱 @OriginalGeekPodcast on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook

Transcript

Steve (00:05)
All right, welcome to the original Geek Random Review. We set the topic, the dice set the direction. We know what we're talking about, we just don't know how. Hi, I'm Steve Scarfo.

Jeff Shaw (00:15)
And I'm Jeff Shaw, and we're talking Spider Noir tonight. Random Review Prime series, what, eight episodes, I think, in this season? Yeah. Dropped all at once. You can go binge like we did, and we recommend it. The

Steve (00:21)
Noah.

A yeah.

goodness. yeah, I I I love it when they drop all at once. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. but yeah, I was I was finished after episode one. Like I'm done. I'm just watching the whole thing.

Jeff Shaw (00:50)
Yeah.

You're engaged. Nice.

Steve (00:57)
well, and I think it's and well and I I again, if you haven't ever watched one of these, shame on you. Thanks for joining us, but keep coming back for these random reviews. we do we don't know what we're gonna talk about quite literally. We have AI generate the list, and so I don't know if this will come up, but both and I Jeff and I are huge fans of Nick Cage. So this is like a double bonus for us because A we get Spider-Man style quality content and we get Nick Cage.

Jeff Shaw (01:24)
Yeah, and we're like Gen X, we're leaning into with Nick Cage some of his early stuff that you may not have checked out, but we both when we were talking about this show and its performance, it reminded us of Vampire's Kiss, which we love. late eighties, early nineties. I can't remember exactly when it came out, but loved that.

Steve (01:40)
Yes. Such a good movie.

And there's there's definitely parts of his performance in here that are absolutely vampires kiss. yeah. All right. Well, so let's do this. Let's jump right in. I I always forget which one of us is supposed to go first. You usually remember. Am I doing? I'm rolling for you. All right. Here we go. On a 20 sided DD dice, a 15. Aha

Jeff Shaw (02:00)
Yeah.

you're you're rolling for me.

Steve (02:14)
The Assistant Alliance, this is a successful diplomacy. Ben's relationship with Janet. the emotional anchor. Karen Rodriguez's Janet gives us the show gives the show its necessary humor. Her sharp diplomacy checks constantly pull Ben back to reality when his spidey sense migraines start driving him into paranoiac fits.

Jeff Shaw (02:38)
Yeah, so I love noir. I love that genre, the detective and the secretary or administrative assistant, whatever we wanna say. that's that whole trope, all of it. I'm in for it. And this was ex executed brilliantly. the yeah, Karen Rodriguez

Steve (02:52)
Whatever the PC term is.

Jeff Shaw (03:08)
she did a fantastic job as Janet and that character of Janet is great. She is and they've already shown her loyalty because she's not been paid in a long time when she finally gets some money in this up in this series. And and then the reveal that she's known he's Spider-Man or the spider for the whole time. So he thinks

Steve (03:21)
Yeah, a long time.

No.

Yes.

Jeff Shaw (03:38)
He's disguised it and there's man, sorry, spoiler. You just gotta like you gotta put a huge spoiler on this. This is such a great reveal. That I love that whole sequence. So I hope this doesn't come up in a r another random review for you. But I which she's like, yeah, I know.

Steve (03:43)
You always say it too late. Well put it in the description.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeff Shaw (04:03)
'Cause he's like, by the way,

Steve (04:03)
How do you know? You told me.

Jeff Shaw (04:05)
and I I we I won't talk too deeply about it, but like I feel like that that like the way she's like kept that under wraps and been super supportive and it such an ally and and like yeah, I know. Like you've let me know this a few times. So

Steve (04:28)
Yeah.

Jeff Shaw (04:29)
Yeah, I feel yeah, great call out for that being a diplomacy check, a fifteen and yeah, she's great.

Steve (04:37)
Yeah, I I I love the dynamic. You know, you can always tell when actors have real kind of on screen chemistry and you can tell that they were p they were playful together in the scenes because she's just so

relax is the word I want to use. I I think you you know, you kinda have to be if you're gonna be a good actor anyway, but I think the dynamic between them was great. Everything you said, I if you hadn't mentioned it, I was gonna mention the reveal 'cause it was one of my favorite parts too. Like the whole and I love that they did a little montage of every time he told her and it was like more and more ridiculous. And it was more and more ridiculous. It was just funny. Anyway.

Jeff Shaw (05:14)
So he's gonna keep going with it. Okay. But each

time he's drunk, so he doesn't remember that he is revealed he's the spider. And

Steve (05:23)
Yes.

Just the fact that he's

a drunk is a whole other take. And that I don't again, I don't know what else is coming. I'm trying not to look at my second screen here. so I don't look at it, but

Jeff Shaw (05:35)
Yeah.

Nice. All right, shall I roll for you?

Steve (05:40)
Roll it up.

Jeff Shaw (05:40)
KF3. This is Failed Fortitude. The midnight slump. The pacing of the mid-season investigation. Stuck in the mud. Episode four and five get deeply bogged down and a complex web of corporate zoning laws, shipping manifests. Viewers complain the gritty momentum of the premiere evaporated into a standard slow-moving procedural.

Your thoughts.

Steve (06:12)
I kind of agree with this one. As much as I loved all eight episodes, those two in the middle were very normal. So for a show where we're talking about Nick Cage, who is an outrageous actor and has the ability to have these amazing performances, which you see actually in maybe parts of five and then six, seven, and eight for sure, it was sort of him

Kind of avoiding being the spider for a little while and then the whole idea that they were building up the bad guys, but in a in a standard cop drama kind of way. Right. It really did come down to, you know, what's the mayor doing and what's the mob boss Silvermane doing and what's and these two guys are going at it and it

They were developing the the villain storylines and and maybe since we didn't get it we can talk a little bit about that after this too, but 'cause I liked the villain twists too. But it seemed like it was, you know, too normal to me. Like you know, it was still good and it's still Cage and it's still the spider, but yeah. If I were gonna rank them in order, those two would probably be at the bottom.

Jeff Shaw (07:25)
Yeah, it's funny d when those

Yeah, and just so you know, like we love this series, absolutely go and watch it. But having said that, I wondered, like, had this been released what like one instead of just all at once, like they do for often, is if they get release this once a week. I I maybe we'd still call it a slump, but I don't know.

But like you're watching all of it in a row. And so you're comparing it all written next to each other. And so I feel like maybe we can be a little more harsh with it because we're like, okay, I know the next episode I can just skip and watch it. I can just fast forward this thing and watch it. as opposed to, man, this is what I get this week. And I'm gonna treasure what I get this week. And so I do wonder if that

you know, we would have thought of it differently, but I I agree with you. And the the movies but I feel like you know, like the Maltese Falcon in in those noir films that this is based on, and even Chinatown, 'cause I know we're obviously not gonna talk about the black and white versus color, but you know, Chinatown with Jack Nicholson

is two hours long. So one of the longer, you know, noirs are right around there. and it has that's the that the mid part of the of any noir film is a little bit of a slog. It doesn't have you know you now you know all the characters who are involved. Now you know the mystery. but you you need to kind of work through the investigation now. And

in an eight C with eight episodes, we're now in that slog of the investigation. And so I I felt like it's the right point just because of the length of a season it's it's harder to kind of get away with, I guess.

Steve (09:42)
Yeah, it's hard to remember too the movie and the the style that it's emulating as a noir is by its very nature an older style storytelling, doesn't fit with Marvel movie action packed back to back. I think we talked about it on a different episode, like in the original Iron Man, they actually cut a scene of Tony when he first flies over to the Middle East again to to

take out all the bad guys because they thought it added too much time. Like and it was not even a bad scene or a slow scene, but like they they cut because they just want to pow pow pow. So when you're used to that, when we get to this slog, which is just the slower of these episodes. But and I know we we don't have them on our list, but I do want to call out one of my favorite parts of this show is

The bad guys. Because they're all bad guys that we know, but they were portrayed in such a different way that because there was the Rhino, there was Sandman, and there was Electro.

Jeff Shaw (10:55)
No, it was so tombstone is a real cli character. Yeah. I thought he was gonna be the rhino. And when I saw his name was Tombstone, I'm like, it's tombstone. Like I didn't really so in it s yeah, exactly. More exactly more reptilian or scales or ri Rhino hide. and not tombstone. So tombstone in the comic book is gray skinned.

Steve (10:57)
Tombstone, sorry.

Yeah. Sorry, I meant to say tunes 'cause when they first show him change it looks like their scales. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeff Shaw (11:25)
so it's that stony look, and this guy didn't look like he was made of stone.

Steve (11:29)
Yeah, and I don't mean that they look the same and that's one of the things I liked because, you know, Electro you know, in the Lakes movies was Jamie Foxx.

Jeff Shaw (11:32)
Okay.

Calling

it a megawatt. I'm wondering if that's a whole separate character. Or is it supposed to be electro just 'cause it's the nineteen thirties, we're gonna go megawatt.

Steve (11:42)
I don't know. I think it's supposed to be Electro. They don't call

Yeah, and they don't call him Sandman. They never call him Sandman. He's the same name. The character names are all the same. So the in the the human side of them, their real character names. Those were all cause I looked him up, those were all the same names as the original Spider-Man Nemesis's Nemesis, but

Jeff Shaw (11:59)
Yeah. So you got yeah.

Never side.

Steve (12:10)
Nemesa, but I think it was just cool that they took it was lift and shift, and it wasn't just the Nick Cage being the spider and the origin story being completely different. I loved that. I will tell you my favorite line in the entire show is with no power comes no responsibility.

Jeff Shaw (12:37)
Ha

ha ha.

Steve (12:39)
I

absolutely fell over laughing when I heard it because it is the best possible w twist to the actual line. there's nothing bad about the show, even those the two episodes we talked about, right? you'll still enjoy them, even though they are the slowest of the episodes. But I say that with the big asterisk because they're still really good. anything else did you want to bring up? I know I brought up a couple extra things.

Jeff Shaw (13:06)
No, no, I love that. With no power comes no responsibility. Yes, that was really good. And then yeah, so if you love Nicolas Cage, go see it. if you haven't watched Vampire's Kiss, I don't know if that's not what this is about, but see that as well. And then you will appreciate that all of especially

Steve (13:11)
It was the best.

Yes.

Jeff Shaw (13:31)
when we have the reveal that Janet knew he was a spider all along and that little montage. It's like Vampires Kiss All Over again. It's awesome.

Steve (13:37)
Yeah.

in the physical humor of how he moves is

Jeff Shaw (13:44)
Yes.

wait, I did want to say one thing. The director said, and whether this whether he was joking or not, I don't know. But he said that he wanted Nick Cage to play this role of a character who's trying to learn how to be human. Because Nick Cage himself has to study how to be human. And so yes.

Steve (14:09)
my god, I didn't hear that. That's awesome.

Jeff Shaw (14:12)
I love that. I'm like, my god. So glad I'm glad you triggered that memory for me. So yeah, so that's that's a part of this. And it's and I will I agree. I could not imagine anyone pulling this off other than Nick Cage. I I don't this doesn't someone else could do a good job, but no one could do what this what he did.

Steve (14:37)
All right. Well listen, Spider Noir, it's on Prime. check it out. absolutely like, follow, share, all of our stuff. come back for more of these. We're starting to put out some more smaller segments, so hopefully you'll hang out with us for some of those. but go see Spider Noir. Not go see. Turn it on and watch it. Prime video. You don't have to go anywhere. You can watch it on your phone. I don't watch it on a real screen.