Black Bag review: a Soderbergh spy thriller with breakneck pace

Some directors, however great, get stuck in a rut, pumping out much of a muchness over and over again. The same cannot be said for Steven Soderberg, who has made a virtue of being all over the place in terms of what floats his boat, filmically, since his eye-poppingly titled 1989 debut feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

Garlanding Soderbergh with a Palme d’Or at the tender age of 26, that film cast Andie MacDowell and Peter Gallagher as a frustrated couple whose marriage is blown up by James Spader’s VHS-recorded confession kink. After a run of intriguing though less successful indie films, Soderbergh went bigger with incendiary crime caper Out of Sight and the smoke-show pairing of Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney.

Watch the Black Bag trailer.

From there, a bevy of biopics followed, including the Julia Roberts-led legal drama Erin Brockovich, Benicio Del Toro as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and Michael Douglas as a latter-day Liberace in the high camp of Behind the Candelabra. Soderbergh picked up a Best Director Oscar with his multiple-perspective drug trade drama Traffic, while prescient pandemic-chiller Contagion was everyone’s favourite lockdown rewatch.

Helming two out of three Magic Mike movies led by Channing Tatum’s gyrating hips, Soderbergh also followed Clooney through the Ocean’s franchise heist movies before director Gary Ross recruited his The Good German star Cate Blanchett on the reboot.

More recently, he shot mental health-driven thriller Unsane on an iPhone with The Crown star Claire Foy and followed Lucy Liu from a ghostly point of view in spooky chiller Presence, still in certain Australian cinemas.

What they all have in common, from big budget to barely any, is a recurring troupe of actors and Soderbergh’s endlessly inventive approach. He’s a dab hand at economic storytelling that’s thematically rich, something of a lost art these days.

Black Bag: triple date with disaster

Which brings us neatly to Black Bag. Penned by Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, who collaborated with Soderbergh on both Presence and the Zoë Kravitz-led techno crime drama Kimi, this latest offering pops at a brisk 90 minutes.

Blanchett’s back in one of her sassiest turns yet, as Kathryn St. Jean, one half of a sexy spy couple, a real hot topic on screens small and silver at the mo. She’s very much in mutual love with bespectacled husband and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) colleague George Woodhouse.

Depicted by Soderbergh’s Haywire lead Michael Fassbender, he’s in The Killer mode, inscrutably blue steel about whether his wife’s a traitor to their country.

But rather than follow the BIG Bond mould inherited by their co-star Pierce Brosnan, as withering NCSC boss Arthur Stieglitz, George prefers the quieter Agatha Christie approach. Inviting four suspiciously fingered sleuths to his and Kathryn’s to-die-for London home for dinner, he intends to assess hers and their possible guilt in one evening.  

Tom Burke, so good in The Souvenir if not so much Furiosa, works his mercurial wit as the pompous Freddie Smalls, a slitheringly machismo character you wouldn’t trust with your lunch, let alone the nation’s most hush-hush ‘black bag’ secrets.

In fact, his top-ranking security clearance functions as a get-out-of-jail card for infidelity, as his much-put-upon partner, IT whizz kid Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), notes. She gets to the point in dramatic fashion during the fabulously awkward entrée, where you can’t even trust the curry, let alone the kitchen knife.

In another surely not suitable for spy work set-up, Bridgerton breakout Regé-Jean Page, as Barbour jacket-favouring Colonel James Stokes, is also in a relationship with their communal psychiatrist, Dr Zoe Vaughan, played by another brilliant Bond alum in Naomie Harris. She has a lot of work on her plate dealing with their collective egos as these three couples go to work on one another.

All four younger spies know they’ve been invited for ulterior motives. They’re just itching to figure out why and who’s in deepest trouble.

Black Bag: dinner drama

Whipping along at a breakneck pace, Black Bag crosses international borders and zips from London clubs to the English countryside and back. But thanks to Koepp’s snappy dialogue, a gift in Soderbergh’s capable hands, it’s always as tightly drawn as the claustrophobic soirées that bookend its predominantly talkie action.

In this actor’s piece, the mighty Blanchett and Fassbender are on fire. It’s a delight to drop in, voyeuristically, on Kathryn and George’s pillow chat, testing the corners of their marriage against the mutually assured destruction of national security concerns.

Among our finest, they convey as much in an arched eyebrow or the slink of a shoulder as in their gamely sparring dialogue and the intricacies of key card swapping antics, with a Babygirl frisson to their dangerous liaison.

If you aren’t familiar with Abela’s work on criminally underseen drama Industry, then wait a hot minute, because she’s going to be huge. Demonstrating an electric screen presence when going toe-to-toe with the pros, there’s attitude aplenty wrapped up in her performance and this Black Bag.

Harris magnificently fields not-so-friendly fire during therapy sessions, particularly during a pointed tête-à-tête with Blanchett. Burke and Page equip themselves admirably, too, in a film that seems primed to lend itself to an ongoing series (please?) where Blighty’s latest darkest hour is hardly the point.

The MacGuffin, a ‘Severus’ something-or-other that could lead to a nuclear meltdown if its code winds its way into enemy hands, is beside the point. We’re here to watch these worms turn before dessert’s served in what might be Soderbergh’s tastiest dish yet.

Black Bag is in Australian cinemas from 13 March.

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