Few genres so readily present themselves for pastiche as noir, and few are so freighted with tropes that can feel, in the wrong hands, like perfunctory box-ticking on a tired checklist. There’s the laconic, hard-drinking detective; the haunting, lounge-singing femme fatale; the crooked cops and the dapper gangsters; all speaking their rat-a-tat dialogue on darkened streets and in smoke-striped speakeasies. Plugging this format into an already complex superhero universe may therefore seem a big ask, but it’s one that Spider-Noir (Prime Video) seems intent on answering – and, for the most part, does very well indeed.You’d be forgiven for thinking this a direct, live-action spin-off from Sony’s hugely successful Spider-Verse animated films, as it features Nicolas Cage resuming his voice role from that series. But Spider-Noir introduces its title character not as the noir-themed Peter Parker he portrays in those movies but as the private dick Ben Reilly (himself a storied character from the Spider-Man comics, whose alias is the Scarlet Spider; I promise I won’t go any further with backstory than that). Reilly was once a crimefighter named the Spider – very much not Spider-Man – but he hung up his mask five years ago, after the demise of his former wife, whose death has spurred his retirement and generated a seemingly unceasing torrent of two-second flashbacks for viewers to repeatedly savour.It’s not immediately clear how many of Spider-Man’s typical suite of powers have been ported over to Cage’s irascible, gruff Ben Reilly. He appears to produce webs organically but also seems content to ascend fire escapes on foot rather than using the sticky skin with which the web-slinger is traditionally endowed. His spidey sense is present, if mostly indistinguishable from a periodic migraine, but his strength and stamina seem a good deal reduced from past Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?). All of these quibbles could, of course, be explained away by the fact that we’ve never seen a 62-year-old man play this character before, so maybe that’s just where Spider-Man gets to in his dotage.It’s an unintended consequence of comic-book world-building that such discrepancies – Reilly v Parker, Spider v Spider-Man – are not immediately identifiable as either plot points to be explained in due course or as muddles owing to rights disputes, but it makes little difference to a series with so much silly charm. Cage brings his trademark brand of hangdog weirdness to a premise that is, effectively, a $150 million (€130 million) Saturday Night Live skit. Brendan Gleeson is in fine, scenery-chewing form as Finn Byrne, aka Silvermane, an organised-crime boss with a thick pocketbook and an even thicker Dublin accent, who pursues, and then hires, Reilly as the emergence of superpowered individuals strikes fear among New York’s criminal underworld.Brendan Gleeson and Jack Huston in Spider-Noir.