Count Steven Soderbergh as one of those hard-to-stereotype and prolific American directors with a chameleonic dial-a-style approach each time he hits the screens. The director launched his career with a shoestring budget indie sensation, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and has since swerved through a dizzying variety of genres and positions on the art film versus popcorn movie index. He has shown his skill with mainstream movie polish via the Ocean’s Eleven and Magic Mike franchises, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich, but also taking left turns into artier turf with Kafka and Unsane.
What we have learned over the years and through his filmography is that a new Soderbergh film is always worth watching, a habit newly bolstered by the entertaining “who done it” (and “who done what to whom”) new spy thriller Black Bag. In an odd way, Soderbergh’s latest (written by David Koepp, also behind Soderbergh’s 2022 film Kimi) manages to blend the witty and crisply choreographed caper-ish quality of Ocean’s Eleven with his less commercial gray area character studies. He has it both ways.
As viewers looking for a casual but engaging Tuesday-night film outing, we also get it both ways. In this taut, almost Agatha Christie–like story maze about British spies, lies, and digitalscapes, the entertainment factor is cleverly twofold. We are both drawn into the interpersonal puzzle of its espionage-bathed characters while kept at an arm’s length, as objective observers of the story-gaming at hand.
Black Bag’s high watchability factor emanates from the presence and nuances of its protagonist couple, sturdy acting talents Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. The pair gamely plays a married couple in the spy business, between whom some seeming ploys of duplicity and suspicion creates a potential wedge in their mutual trust. The plot thickens, as spy thrillers are wont to do, and further story detailing here could invoke punishment from the Plot Spoiler Insurgency Act.
Suffice to say, the spy couple angle — as previously seen in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Spy Kids — is both the meat and the exotic spice of the film. Assorted spy film cliches are tossed into the recipe, including an evil nuclear doomsday twist and possibly mole-like agendas among the slippery operatives. But at the charismatic center of the film, we can savor the cool chemistry of Fassbender’s icy charms and Blanchett’s ever-magnetic poise.
These high stakes actors are on something of a vacation here, compared to Blanchett’s wild ride performance in Tár and Fassbender’s chilling intensity in The Killing. And we’re invited to the party for a tidily paced 90-minute romp in a theater near us (for optimal cinematic soaking).
View the trailer here.
