‘Black Bag’ Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Twisty Spy Drama Is a Return to Elite Form

Spy movies typically come in one of two flavors: Noisy and explosive (think James Bond and Mission: Impossible) or clever and quiet (think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). That first kind lends itself to blockbuster filmmaking, but the second kind — which can be just as lethally intense — has a strong fanbase of its own, voracious readers of John le Carré and the like who enjoy a more cerebral variety of spy film.

Black Bag, the new spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, definitely falls in the latter category, but that doesn’t mean you should mistake it for arthouse fare. This is Soderbergh at his most jaunty and playful, having fun in a way we maybe haven’t seen since the glory days of the Ocean’s trilogy. If there’s any justice left in a world where moviegoers rarely turn out to theaters for mid-range, non-IP films featuring classic movie stars, this will easily become Soderbergh’s biggest hit since Magic Mike.

‘Black Bag’ Offers Up a Knotty and Satisfying Spy-Based Mystery

Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, married British spies working for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) who only care about two things — their jobs and each other. Which of those two they care about more becomes the film’s primary focus once Fassbender is tasked with rooting out a betrayer within the agency who’s stolen a cyber-worm called Severus that can cause nuclear reactor meltdowns, kill thousands, and destabilize nations.

Kathryn is identified as one of the five agency employees who had the proper access to pull off the heist. The other four potential traitors are two additional couples. Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) plays Freddie, a high-ranking operative whom George passed over for a promotion and is dating Clarissa (Marisa Abela from HBO’s Industry), a junior-level technician who’s half his age. Similarly, Regé-Jean Page’s debonair, up-and-coming agent James has an office romance going with Dr. Zoe Vaughan, an NCSC therapist played by the always reliable Naomie Harris (who earned her spy stripes in the Daniel Craig Bond films).

Determined to expose the rat, George immediately formulates a plan, which leads off with inviting all the suspects over for dinner. Distrust runs thick, as George proposes some parlor games that immediately have the sextet diving into their personal foibles. Fassbender, with thick-framed glasses sitting neatly on his chiseled face, makes for a compelling investigator, as George begins putting together the pieces of the puzzle that will be doled out to the audience over the next 90-some minutes.

At first, it seems like Black Bag might be a sort of chamber drama or locked-room mystery, with the entirety of events playing out over the course of the dinner. But the riveting story, so carefully crafted by screenwriter David Koepp — who also wrote Kimi and the recently released Presence for Soderbergh — eventually does widen in scope, bringing in shady Russian operatives and an intelligence chief played by former Bond Pierce Brosnan.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett Lead a Seductively Appealing Cast

Black Bag doesn’t so much reinvent spy-movie tropes as it relishes in them; there’s a polygraph-test montage in the film’s final act, with the film cutting between George questioning the various suspects, that’s one of the most charged in recent memory. Even better is the “aha!” moments that come soon after when the audience comes to realize why George chose some of the oddly specific questions he did.

Best of all, Soderbergh refuses to let the film get bogged down in over-seriousness. Set to a bouncy, jazzy score, Black Bag has a style that somehow feels both shaggy and exacting at the same time, which places it on very similar grounds to Ocean’s 11, the director’s breakout mainstream smash. Fassbender and Blanchett’s characters have wildly different personalities. His calculated preciseness makes him seem like a not-too-distant cousin to the hitman he recently played in David Fincher’s The Killer, while she’s more of a passionate firebrand.

Even when you’re not sure whose side Kathryn is on, you’ll still find yourself rooting for the two of them, and together Fassbender and Blanchett have effortless chemistry, recalling George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, a movie that remains Soderbergh’s crowning achievement. So, when looking at how Black Bag fits into Soderbergh’s filmography, merely the company it keeps points to it being his most accessible and satisfying crowd-pleaser in years. (Sorry, Logan Lucky fans.)

The supporting cast capably steps up to match the movie-star performances given by Fassbender and Blanchett. In particular, Abela, who is likely the least known of the bunch, brings a wicked independence to a character whose station at the agency makes her feel like an outsider around her higher-ranking colleagues. It’s also fun to see Brosnan do his own version of Bond’s M with added streaks of pretentious righteousness and moral ambiguity.

If Only ‘Black Bag’ Could Launch a Whole New Franchise

Black Bag proves entertaining the whole way through, even as the double-crosses and red herrings make tracking its central mystery a dizzying affair. Ultimately, it all makes sense in the end, sometimes itself a victory in these types of movies. A guilty party is exposed and dealt with in a manner that’s immensely gratifying while still matching the smaller-scale feel of the story. In a better reality, this would be the first film of a brand-new franchise — a spy series relying more on smarts than stunts or pyrotechnics. As it stands, let’s just be thankful Black Bag exists at all and can serve as a thrilling reminder of just how good a filmmaker Soderbergh can be when he brings his A-game.

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