Soderbergh and Koepp Redeem Themselves With 'Black Bag'

The duo's new spy thriller is considerably more entertaining than their recent, abysmally dumb ghost movie, 'Presence.'

Black Bag, the new collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp, is good enough to redeem them for Presence, the abysmally dumb ghost movie the duo released just a couple of months ago. Black Bag is not particularly meaningful and still doesn’t rank with either filmmaker’s best work, but, hey, at least it’s brisk and fun.

The story centers around married British spies George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). A mole within their organization is looking to sell a top-secret weapon known as Severus, and George is tasked with finding the culprit. Unfortunately for him, Kathryn is on the short list of suspects. Now, George has to figure out whether his wife is a villain and, if she is, what to do about it.

The other potential traitors are, conveniently, also all halves of spy couples. There’s Zoe (Naomie Harris), the shrink with whom all of these secret agents must share their confidence; her lover/patient, James (Regé-Jean Page); Freddie (Tom Burke), who has recently lost a promotion to James; and Freddie’s much-younger partner, Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Putting three couples at the heart of the story means that Black Bag is nominally about trust in romantic relationships… but truth be told, the movie doesn’t actually have a whole lot to say about that issue. Mostly, it’s just concerned with espionage and mystery.

In fact, the previous Soderbergh outing of which Black Bag might be most reminiscent is 2013’s Side Effects, which is about a woman who stabs her husband to death and blames it on an antidepressant. Other directors might have used that story to say something deep about our culture’s reliance (or, some might argue, overreliance) on prescription mental health medications, but for Soderbergh, the psychiatric aspect of the narrative was really just there to motor the murder mystery.

Soderbergh and Koepp, who have respectively amused us over the years with an array of con artists (Ocean’s Eleven), neo-noir anti-heroes (Snake Eyes), and, yes, other scheming spies (Mission: Impossible), are far more comfortable trying to pull the wool over our eyes than they are with the pseudo-profound familial drama of Presence (see also: their 2022 agoraphobia thriller, Kimi). Thus, whereas the lack of lofty ambition in Side Effects felt like a missed opportunity, it’s totally fine that Black Bag doesn’t really wanna dig in deep on issues of marital certitude, because the cast is great, the plot is serviceable, and the whole thing moves at a clip: at a gloriously brief 93 minutes, Black Bag doesn’t wear out its welcome, let alone leave the audience with enough time to think about whether or not all the labyrinthine subterfuge makes any logical sense.

The film does make some semi-meta nods to Hollywood’s longest-running secret agent franchise: Harris played Moneypenny in the most recent spate of James Bond movies, and Pierce Brosnan, a former 007 himself, shows up briefly as George and Kathryn’s superior (to say nothing of the fact that Fassbender’s character, whose name may be an homage to John le Carré’s George Smiley, also wears decidedly Harry Palmer-esque spectacles). But, once more, these casting choices feel cute more than meaningful. Black Bag has as little to say about the history of espionage on the silver screen as it does about the ways lies may or may not permeate a domestic partnership.

Indeed, one may note that the movie’s very premise is a tad tired: spies have been worrying about whether or not they’re sleeping with the enemy for decades now. For some reason (AHEM), it seems as though it’s always the man who’s in danger of being betrayed by the women. Black Bag does nothing to subvert that trope, even if they do make Kathryn the gun-toting badass and George the behind-the-desk tactician.

Still, Black Bag is more entertaining than most other recent uses of an identical set-up, like Robert Zemeckis’ Allied. It’s nice to have my faith in Soderbergh and Koepp restored.