Directed by: Steven Soderbergh.
Written by: David Koepp.
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Regé-Jean Page.
Runtime: 93 minutes.
‘Black Bag’ brings back sexy Soderbergh spycraft
Who cares about plot when you’ve got a cast that looks this good?
“Black Bag” starts, as all respectable spy films do, with a very sexy dinner party. You’ve got Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence agents George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, burning hot for one another under a cool and collected British reserve working in modern English espionage. To their tastefully appointment townhome, they’ve invited fellow agency colleagues played by a shaggy and charismatic Tom Burke, his young and bratty paramour played by Marisa Abela, and mismatched lovers played by Naomie Harris and “Bridgerton” heartthrob Regé-Jean Page.
The wine flows, animosities surface, and secrets start to spill. It’s hard at any moment to tell if these people want to sleep with one another or fight. Perhaps it’s both.
The plot is mostly inconsequential, involving dangerous malware gone missing, possibly sold to enemies of the state. With thousands of lives and national security on the line, all signs point to a mole within the agency headed by dashing spy-thriller veteran Pierce Brosnan (his field days as former 007 are over; this is strictly a desk job). Someone at that dinner party is responsible; to George’s confusion and deep chagrin, Kathryn seems the most likely culprit.
Fassbender’s George, utterly devoted to beguiling beauty Kathryn, misses nothing in his reserved observance – not the errant ticket stub in the waste basket or Kathryn’s sideways answers to pointed questions. Could his darling wife possibly be behind the missing malware? Worse than committing treason against her country, would she dare commit treason against him, a man who exposes secrets because he so abhors them, and risk their marriage?
Those seemingly high stakes are all secondary to the film’s surface pleasures, which flow as abundantly as the wine at a sexy dinner party. Soderbergh is having a gas here, driving in the same lane as films like “Out of Sight,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” and “Haywire,” with an assist from a snappy script by David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Spider-Man”). Everyone looks like a million pounds sterling in Soderbergh’s vision of sleek and corporate London espionage, with Fassbender and Blanchett a sharply tailored twosome commanding the screen.
Sure, civilian lives are on the line, but more important to Soderbergh and Koepp is the messy in-fighting between an ensemble of beautiful people trying to outsmart, double cross, one-up, undermine and have sex with one another.
Spies are just people, after all. These spies just happen to be more beautiful and charismatic than the rest of us.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
