Steven Soderbergh is an elite filmmaker who is an expert craftsman at creating both striking visual aesthetic and engaging atmosphere. So an elegant British spy drama, Black Bag, was primed to utilize the best of his creative sensibilities. And it did. The film is gorgeously shot, yielding that trademark soft glow of both artificial and natural light (Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who is also the cinematographer of his films).
He’s also adept at capturing compelling performances from A-list movie stars, where both Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender light up the screen with fierce, cold calculation. Fassbender is particularly good in this type of environment. It made me want to rewatch Prometheus.
But where I struggled was with legendary screenwriter David Koepp’s (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible) story. I found the spy games at play to be mostly uninteresting, exacerbated by suboptimal pacing, which was surprising given the stakes involved and the film’s brisk 93-minute runtime. Personally I think this film would have been better suited as a prestige Apple TV+ limited series, because that’s what it felt like.
I welcome different takes on this genre and if the intent is to focus more on the personal intrigue of spies vs. the operational execution, that’s fine. But then we need to spend more time with the characters in order for our investment in them yield more weight. And simply put, as a fan of this genre, I was yearning for more white-knuckle sequences of ops. We only got a taste of that (which was great), but I didn’t care for the “whodunnit” dinner party and therapy session settings. Can I just get some thrills?
For me, spy movies work best when there’s palpable level of excitement and stress that the audience can feel. Rarely in this film did I feel either of those things, which is a bummer and what I was hoping for. Black Bag is fantastic to look at and is incredibly well-acted, so with its short runtime I would recommend checking it out if you dig spy vibes.
But, unfortunately, I believe it’s a film that will soon be forgotten within the pantheon of both the genre and Soderbergh’s filmography.
