Black Bag Review: Sleek, Snappy, Stylish Spy Thriller
While the world awaits Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, here’s the starter of a spy thriller called Black Bag to whet your appetite for the time being. Steven Soderbergh’s latest endeavour, his second effort in the short months after his POV horror Presence, trades action-packed thrills for something more psychological in his execution. A thinking man’s spy thriller for the grown-ups, to be exact — the kind of movie which relies more on the crafty storytelling and character manipulations.
The good news is that it mostly works. Soderbergh once again collaborates with David Koepp, the screenwriting veteran who is no stranger to the spy genre, for co-writing the underrated Mission: Impossible. Black Bag gets off to a promising start as we follow George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) from behind, where the camera stays on him in a well-shot single-take opening scene.
The story doesn’t waste time getting to business as George meets up with his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), for a mission. And that is to find out who’s the culprit behind the leak of a top-secret cyber weapon nicknamed Severus. George is given the list, and one of the names includes his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). The rest of them — Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), the agency’s shrink Dr Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and satellite imagery expert Clarissa (Marisa Abela) — also happen to be from the same workplace.
George only has a week to accomplish his mission, and with the time ticking, he decides to invite them over for dinner at his place. The subsequent scene at the dinner table showcases Soderbergh’s sleight-of-hand direction in turning Koepp’s genre know-how script into an intriguing game of spilling out the truths, thanks to one of the drug-infused dishes.
So, one thing that I notice here, for all the seriousness of its spy-movie tropes, I didn’t expect the story to have a dash of deadpan humour subtly incorporated into Black Bag. The dialogues are sharp and lively, and it helps that the acting is top-notch. You can’t go wrong with casting Michael Fassbender in an icy-cold, yet sneaky role of an intelligence officer attempting to flush out whoever is involved in a leak. He pairs well with Cate Blanchett, whose seductively enigmatic character as Kathryn may or may not be the person George is targeting from the beginning.
The supporting cast from Regé-Jean Page to Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela is just as solid. Apart from the elaborate dinner scene earlier in the movie, I also enjoy the one revolved around George monitoring Kathryn’s moves using a spy satellite with the help of Clarissa, which effectively combines the surveillance thrills of old-school espionage and witty repertoire. Not to mention another scene where George conducts the polygraph tests on his suspected colleagues.
There’s an immaculate sense of style within Soderbergh’s world of spy — all glossy and elegant cinematography (under his pseudonym of Peter Andrews), David Holmes’ atmospheric score and Ellen Mirojnick’s well-curated, sleek-looking costume design no matter Fassbender’s black turtleneck and thick-rimmed glasses or Blanchett’s matching cognac leather jacket over her black ensemble.
Black Bag also runs at a shorter-than-expected running time at just 94 minutes, considering the labyrinthine storytelling that usually belongs to a two-hour mark or more. Taut? Not really, as some scenes tend to meander around while the payoff after all the twist-and-turn buildup doesn’t exactly culminate in something I would call satisfying. It’s rather low-key and too mannered for its own good.
Even if Soderbergh isn’t meant his Black Bag to be in the tradition of James Bond and Mission: Impossible approach, a few jolts on raising the stakes higher would have been appreciated. Still, some shortcomings aside, Black Bag remains one of Soderbergh’s better directorial efforts in his recent filmography.
