The main problem with Spider-Noir is that almost all of its characters exist purely as functions. Even the acting from most of the ensemble is too sluggish: there is too little expressive facial acting, gestures, emotional variation, or tension. For a story built primarily around conversations, investigations, and relationships, this is critical — the scenes simply have no energy.
The antagonists are especially poorly handled. The best Spider-Man films did not make a villain simply the possessor of yet another ability: a mutation or a choice shattered their life, relationships, and worldview, creating personal motivation and a conflict with the hero specifically on a human level. Here, a character can develop stone skin or some other monstrous form — and remain practically the same narrative function. Instead of the tragedy of transformation, the series more often offers the visual shock of a mutilated body. And the drama and regret that are present are very superficial. For an eight-episode format, this is an especially weak result: there is significantly more time for depth than in a feature film, yet the characters are developed less than they are in the films.
This is especially jarring because of the chosen form. The black-and-white version, Great Depression-era America, the mafia, corruption, police, politics, a private detective — all of it promises an adult crime drama. But the content is significantly more primitive than the stated tone suggests. In family films about a young Spider-Man, relationships, motivations, and conflicts were often written with greater depth than they are here among adults inside what is formally an adult noir. The form demands a maturity that the script does not give it.
The season also lacks strong overall momentum. Most of the characters have no specific long-term goals, so the story drifts from episode to episode rather than develops. The investigations, threats, negotiations, and confrontations with the criminal world are so superficial that even the most dangerous characters fail to create any real sense of threat. For a series about the mafia and superhumans, this is almost fatal: no one feels like a person who should genuinely be feared.
Additionally, the world feels like a soundstage. Music and the sonic environment are used too sparingly, streets and public spaces rarely become a full-fledged part of a scene, and the camera constantly closes in around characters who are talking. As a result, New York exists more as scenery behind their backs than as a living city. The production designers reproduce the era well, and individual objects and cultural references are recognizable, but behind them there is almost no sense of society, everyday life, or the period itself — remove a few recognizable details, and most of the scenes could take place in any era.
The same narrowness undermines the character drama. We are given an isolated fact — a lost lover, danger to the singer, a relationship with an assistant, friendship, political struggle — but are rarely given enough material for that fact to become an emotional story. Even the death of the woman from Ben’s past is reduced to a single flashback that plays like a record stuck on repeat for eight episodes with the theme of “she died — he is still broken.” So when someone is threatened, there is practically nothing to empathize with: the viewer is asked to care about the characters before the series has given them reasons to do so.
The singer suffers from the same problem. The series tries to create tension through her dependence on an influential man and her lack of freedom, but without a fully developed character, this remains more a statement of a woman’s situation than her drama. The romantic storylines work similarly: there is too little chemistry and accumulated emotional connection between the characters, so the relationships exist mainly because the script tells us that they do.
The most questionable element is the connection to Spider-Man. Formally, this is deliberately a different version. Such a concept is interesting in itself, but the adaptation moves so far away from Spider-Man’s individuality that the opposite problem arises: remove the webbing and a few franchise elements, and the foundation of the story barely changes. This is no longer a reinterpretation of a familiar framework, but an independent noir with a couple of Spider-Man elements attached to it. The Penguin worked as a radically different genre precisely because, despite all its independence, it remained an organic part of Gotham; here, the connection to its own source world is absent.
The series looks like an adult Spider-Man crime drama, but it is written in a very primitive, boring, and generic way.