I wish that Spider-Noir was better. Nobody could be more invested in film noir than I am, so I always see the latest effort to revive or rework the genre with naive hopes, thinking maybe, just maybe they’ll pull it off this time. They almost never do.

One of the worst ways to do neo-noir is to stick slavishly close to the most clichéd ways the genre worked in its classic era of the 1940s and ’50s. That inevitably means a cynical gumshoe detective modeled on Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941) or The Big Sleep (1945) trying to solve an impossibly twisty case in a cityscape of mean streets where he meets colorful urban characters and violent dangers around every corner. It also means there will be a sultry femme fatale at the center who’ll probably sing a mesmerizing siren song in a nightclub. She will erotically fascinate the detective, and most likely at some point hire him — and, at another point, betray him.

He’ll likely provide some voice-over narration, at least early on, in a sardonic, slangy way. He’ll also probably have a friendly female assistant, a loyal Girl Friday who runs his shabby, spartan office, an office that’s his only home and shows he may be down and out, but he’s fundamentally honest, not on the take in this corrupt world. He’s got a loose alliance with some local savant who also knows his way around the city, an unusually decent cop, say, or a fellow detective, or some other wised-up crony.