“Thirteen years after announcing his retirement, Steven Soderbergh is busier than ever,” said John Nugent in Empire. Coming just two months after his last film, “Black Bag” is “tremendous fun: think ‘Ocean’s 11’, if they were spies”.
Like that earlier hit, it is “cool and confident” and features an “A-list cast” and a “punchy” script “full of mile-a-minute” dialogue. Michael Fassbender plays an “icy” British spy tasked with identifying a traitor in his agency. When he is presented with a list of suspects, he finds on it the name of his “beloved wife and colleague” (Cate Blanchett), throwing all loyalties into doubt. What follows nods to genre convention, but contains “very little in the way of action”. Instead, its “pleasures lie in the dialogue, the twists, the reveals”, leading to “a delightful Agatha Christie-style drawing-room denouement” in which the mole is finally exposed.
This is a “lean to the bone” film in which the “twists are unexpected, yet never overstretched”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. It’s gloriously populated with loathsome characters, and they are impeccably acted by the likes of Tom Burke, Pierce Brosnan and Marisa Abela. Still, this is “Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command”: their performances drip with “old-school star power”, and they expertly convey the tensions involved in maintaining trust when your careers are based on deceit.
“Black Bag” is “as much a close study of a marriage as a spy tale”, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Admittedly, it’s “evanescent, a slick diversion you forget soon after the end credits have rolled”. But for the length of its running time, it “keeps you glued”.
All-star Steven Soderbergh spy film is ‘cool and confident’
