‘Black Bag’ Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Spy Thriller Is a Cool Cucumber

Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is the form of old style caper that the filmmaker could make in his sleep, and sadly on this case, it feels as if he did simply that. Just like the Ocean’s collection, the movie seeks to pay tribute to a bygone period of style cool—to a model of common escapist cinema the place stunning folks casually navigated high-stakes conditions whereas buying and selling blithe bon mots. That it finally involves really feel so inconsequential could also be partly by design, nevertheless it’s exhausting to not want that the newly prolific Soderbergh had woken up a bit to present the routine plot machinations on this London-set spy yarn the identical spark that he’s delivered to comparable style throwbacks prior to now, amongst them 1998’s Out of Sight.

Black Bag drops us into the shadowy milieu of British intelligence brokers with a gap one-take shot that follows prime agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) by way of a London nightclub and towards a clandestine back-alley assembly by which he’s knowledgeable of the potential of a traitor inside his ranks. So begins a weeklong investigation into the brokers on his high-level workforce, which incorporates his spouse, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), who emerges because the almost certainly suspect in a Bondian plot to provoke nuclear disaster in Russia by stealing and promoting an agency-designed cyber-worm machine known as Severus on the black market.

The opposite 4 suspects are launched throughout a banquet thrown by George and Kathryn at their stylish townhome. George, who’s extremely revered within the company as a prodigious polygraph examiner, makes use of the event to subtly examine his fellow brokers: boorish philanderer Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), younger surveillance professional Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), psychiatrist Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), and hotshot younger colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Web page).

However George and Kathryn’s friends, who’re additionally coupled like their hosts, have their bullshit detectors on excessive alert. The solid has enjoyable with the amusingly tense nature of the state of affairs, particularly as soon as George initiates a sly celebration sport by which every particular person gives up a private decision for the particular person sitting to their proper. The best way that this escalates from jokey barbs about delicate relationship points to outright violence leaves us eagerly anticipating what different charged interpersonal confrontations the movie would possibly subsequently have in retailer.

Black Bag goals to cheekily conflate the duplicitousness of spywork with that which arises in romantic relationships; its title refers back to the code phrase that the characters use once they aren’t approved to expose sure data. As George’s investigation suggests rising guilt on Kathryn’s half, the movie poses questions concerning the authenticity of his long-time marriage to her and the way that may have an effect on his want to guard her as soon as he finds out the reality. However David Koepp’s workmanlike script reveals its hand too early, placing the query of Kathryn’s loyalty kind of to mattress earlier than George has to make any actually troublesome selections on that entrance.

At this level, Black Bag settles into a third act of spinoff reveals and exposition dumps. And by the point the movie involves the tip of its brisk runtime, it seems like nothing a lot has truly occurred, regardless of all of the narrative convolutions. For its half, Fassbender’s wardrobe does a lot of labor channeling ’60s-era Michael Caine, and that sense of cool is infectious sufficient that it could depart you chopping the movie some slack—say, prepared to see it as a darkly comedian commentary on the processes of paperwork. If not, then it’ll be straightforward to see its lack of dramatic and mental depth as indicative of the hastiness that marks Soderbergh’s current output.