Black Bag

Bluesky

Effortlessly cool, Black Bag is a thriller in the classical style. It's in a set of strong traditions, inheritor to all manner of older espionage tales, including in its antagonists. There is a thing, and it's not where it's meant to be, and the person who put it there might turn out be someone who really shouldn't have done so.

That's not a new story, but it's still a good one. Especially when it's this well told. Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to the genre, though Haywire wasn't to everyone's tastes this is, if possible, even more direct. Stronger for it too.

'Cool' isn't just about pose and poise, but perceptions. Icy can be a few things, including 'in charge' and 'informed consent' and 'integrated circuit'. 'Intensive care' too, but for all the spying and tradecraft and threats, the violence is minimal. Not absent, just often concealed. That's even with the vision in the trailer of a loitering munition of some kind. It might be an AeroVironment Switchblade or a Raytheon Coyote but either way it's something not always concealed. A gangster, a trickster, it doesn't matter. Either way it's in good company.

Cate Blanchett is Kathryn St. Jean. She's been in genre adjacent work before, including Hanna (https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/hanna-film-review-by-owen-van-spall). She is in intelligence, you could say she's married to the job. That's almost literal, in the form of husband George Woodhouse. While Blanchett's character is in signals, observing and not emitting, George is a fisherman. Waiting to catch.

Michael Fassbender is channeling Alec Guinness' turn as another George, Le Carre's Smiley, we're more than 50 years past the setting of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but the tone fits just as neatly. That's not the only ingredient in a spy who's rarely shaken or stirred. There's a touch of Harry Palmer too, though it's chana masala, not champignons. A sophisticated palate will discern any number of flavours running through Black Bag, but these are glosses on a traditional recipe. The proof isn't in the pudding. Evidence is much harder to find.

Much of the cast have espionage experience. Naomie Harris and Pierce Brosnan don't have overlapping bonds but it doesn't take a golden eye to spot them. They are joined by TV detective and praetorian Tom Burke, TV duke and Rege-Jean Page, TV Dane and physicist Gustaf Skarsgård, and TV daughter and (having portrayed Amy Winehouse) prima donna Marisa Abela.

David Holmes provides the score, his tenth collaboration with Soderbergh. It's the same mixture of retromodernist jazzy intensity that works as well everywhere else it's used, something that feels updated to the point of uncertainty. The Cold War might be over (again) but old enemies are everywhere. With similar hymnsheets on the stands it makes sense to have familiar tunes from familiar hands. Words like 'breezy' don't quite cover it.

At a bit over an hour and a half Black Bag sails by. There's the odd bit of reminiscence, but flashes aren't -back or -bang as much as they are in the pan. Not as mis-fires, but as meals. Deception by dinner party, hot seats and cold drinks. If it's roast and curried lamb it's not just sacrificial but to the slaughter, with accompaniments not poppadom but polygraphs. Lines have been drawn but they'll be read between.

David Koepp's got two films with Soderbergh out this year though perhaps what it has most in common with Presence is distance. Koepp's no stranger to spying, nor crime, and his original ideas are often more rewarding than his franchise outings. Premium Rush was small and fast-paced. This is perhaps a tonal adaptation. If you've enjoyed a certain kind of conspiracy, your Days Of The Condor, your Conversations, you'll have something here you'll want to consume.

Will it be to everyone's taste? I doubt it. Le Carre and Deighton both had some success as alternatives to Fleming. We've had a reaction to the suave in grittier fare, and that's Bourne fruit. One could lean into action and spectacle but at the extremes it'd be too easy to be found wanting in the reckoning, to find it hard to hold a candle to others' action. If you can't compete on price, compete on quality. Black Bag is cold-filtered and smooth.