Black Bag: A short thriller that underwhelms despite Soderbergh’s big-name leads
Steven Soderbergh’s newest movie suffers familiar issues, but is not his worst
★★½
Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay by David Koepp
Starring Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Pierce Brosnan, and Marisa Abela
Rated R, Now playing.
Steven Soderbergh has long been praised by critics and peers alike for making "avant-garde" films within the Hollywood big-budget system. He employs major stars, but puts them in small-scale dramas often revolving around crime or unsavory situations; just look at how he has Channing Tatum return to his male-stripper roots in Magic Mike (2013), or Daniel Craig drop his 007 suaveness for Logan Lucky (2017). Despite his indie-darling persona and a few great films, including those two romps, Soderbergh misses as often as he hits. Outings like No Sudden Move (2021) pull in fun ensemble casts but squander the big-name actors with poor pacing, headache-inducing camera effects, and unearned twists. His newest movie, Black Bag, suffers these same pacing, filming, and storyline issues. But it's not his worst, and is enjoyable enough — as most British-accented spy fare tends to be.
The thriller opens with British intelligence agent George Woodhouse learning that his wife, Kathryn, is one of only five suspects in a top-secret investigation into the breach of a software called Severus. Although Kathryn is a fellow spy, the two enjoy an unshakable marriage thanks to their crystal-clear boundaries, sealing confidential information in the metaphorical "black bag" and completely trusting in each other. So when Kathryn is implicated in potential wrongdoing, George is unnerved.
He plays it cool, though, inviting the four other suspects and Kathryn (all colleagues) to a dinner party. Fueled by plenty of wine — and a healthy dose of truth serum — tensions rise. Infidelity, jealousy, kinks, and other dirty secrets are exposed, and the party comes quickly to an end when surveillance specialist Clarissa stabs her cheating boyfriend Freddie in the hand with a steak knife. George silently watches the events unfold, clearly weighing the guilt of all the suspects.
After such a high-stakes first scene, the rest of the film follows familiar spy genre patterns: someone is double-crossed, someone is collaborating with the Russians (and the Ukraine war is explicitly invoked, as it was in the latest season of White Lotus), someone orders a drone strike, someone spies on someone's spouse, and someone uses a forged Swiss bank account. Later, we match the same adrenaline of the first dinner in a climactic lie detector scene, but mostly the conversations are dry and low-stakes.
Much of that is the fault of the leads, whom Soderbergh fails to use to their full potential. As George, Michael Fassbender offers a much less intense, intimidating, and ultimately interesting version of the same tactical operative he portrayed in David Fincher's The Killer (2023). Cate Blanchett is a steely Kathryn who musters neither the smarts nor the sex appeal to convince us of her potential masterminding. Furthermore, Pierce Brosnan appears as the hard-nosed agency boss, but the casting is too on-the-nose and never delivers on the James Bond promise he invokes. In a scene meant to pack a punch, Brosnan mostly looks bewildered, as if wondering — just like us — why he is in the movie.
The supporting cast, too, is middling at best. Naomie Harris plays Zoe Vaughn, the agency's therapist, whose dialogue is rooted in a flat-footed relationship with her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page). Tom Burke's Freddie is too bumbling to sell his managing agent potential. Only Marisa Abela, who plays Clarissa, has real panache, imbuing her role with plenty of quirk and charm but standing her ground against the bigger personalities in the room with her. It's no coincidence that her character is the one that does the dinner-table stabbing.
Aside from the mediocre performances, Soderbergh still includes some of his defining, satisfying stylistic choices, such as the playful 20th-century spy music (scored by the director's long standing collaborator David Homes) and quick cuts between characters that deliberately undermine their believability in the aforementioned lie detector scene. Some other choices, however, are half-baked. For example, the film opens with "LONDON," announcing the location in big letters (as is customary in spy fare), but never uses a city nameplate again. Plus, every character we meet is British — and walks around London — so the exposition is pretty clear.
Other choices are downright distracting, such as some camera lens (or After Effects filter?) that adds gaudy auras to lights in every scene. LEDs in an office, TV screens during a surveillance mission, street lamps in Zurich, cabs in London; all are ringed with ugly, blurry light. Especially when the cinematographer is Soderbergh himself (as his moniker Peter Andrews), one wonders why he made the choice.
Ultimately, though, it's hard to regret watching Black Bag. Coming in at 94 minutes, its tight runtime prevents the plot from getting too deep, but also makes for a snappy thriller perfect for a weeknight watch. Just don't expect a payoff like Ocean's Eleven.