{"id":10040966,"date":"2025-03-12T11:07:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T15:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10040966"},"modified":"2025-03-15T06:31:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T10:31:19","slug":"black-bag-review-steven-soderbergh-is-two-for-two-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/03\/12\/black-bag-review-steven-soderbergh-is-two-for-two-in-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Black Bag&#8217; Review: Steven Soderbergh is two-for-two in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp are having a great 2025. After kicking the new year off with <em><a href=\"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2024\/01\/26\/sundance-2024-review-presence-is-a-great-soderbergh-experiment\/\">Presence<\/a><\/em>, a dope little experiment in first-person spectral voyeurism, they\u2019ve switched gears and gone full <em>Ocean\u2019s 11 <\/em>mode. I don\u2019t just mean in terms of a heist or con, which is partly what their new film, <strong><em>Black Bag<\/em><\/strong>, is about, but how this film appeals to the legacy of 20th-century Hollywood (and, well, the British equivalent). You have show-of-force star power in Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Rege-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, and Pierce Brosnan, as well as appearances from the two best-kept secrets of the modern UK scene in Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even better, each performer can be <em>fiercely<\/em> charismatic. If Soderbergh has finely honed one skill for use in his mainstream projects, it\u2019s that he knows how to make an actor into a \u201cmovie star\u201d without it coming across as puffery. As such, <em>Black Bag <\/em>is a thoroughly entertaining spy comedy-thriller, a take on the Le Carre espionage world if all the old men in dim and smokey rooms were young, hot, and having plenty of illicit sex with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of credit should go to Koepp, a much-maligned screenwriter who has penned or co-written genuine classics (<em>Jurassic Park<\/em>, <em>Snake Eyes<\/em>, <em>Carlito\u2019s Way<\/em>, <em>War of the Worlds<\/em>) and some miserable failures (the last two <em>Indiana Jones <\/em>movies, two Dan Brown adaptations, and the Tom Cruise <em>Mummy<\/em>). His recent partnership with Soderbergh, which began with <em>Kimi <\/em>in 2022, has seemingly unchained his creativity \u2014 understandable since he\u2019s been freed from the clutches of Amblin, Lucasfilm, and star\/producers like Cruise. His script has a high-concept logline \u2014 George Woodhouse (Fassbender), a married MI6 agent, is led to believe by a colleague that his wife, Kathryn (Blanchett), may be a mole \u2014 and innovates on it at each turn. The moral turns out to be something like \u201cDon\u2019t shit where you eat, but if you do, be married to Cate Blanchett,\u201d which as solid of advice that one can give, but the twisty, turn-filled execution of Koepp\u2019s plot is delightful, full of <em>Last of Sheila<\/em>-like parlor games that lead to darker revelations about their participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a spy, George is painstakingly devoted to the truth. That doesn\u2019t mean he has scruples \u2014 a master of reading people, constantly concocting scenarios to get his targets to reveal themselves \u2014. Still, he is devoted to pursuing the facts to the bitter end, almost as closely as he hues to his wedding vows. He and Kathryn aren\u2019t Bond-types, wham-bam-thank-you-Ma\u2019am-oh-I-guess-you\u2019re-dead-now-ing their way through a series of occupational hazard-conquests: They are suspiciously faithful to one another, which their colleagues frequently point out to them. It\u2019s a foreign concept to guys like James (Page), who is currently dating Zoe (Harris), the agency\u2019s psychologist, or Freddie (Burke), a playboy type who is a certifiable sex addict, having all those annoying side-effects that James Bond never seemed to pick up in the form of kids and long-term partners. His latest, Clarissa (Abela), is a bit younger than him, but she\u2019s about four times as smart, and George recognizes her as a throughly <em>honest<\/em> person \u2014 especially when she stabs Freddie\u2019s hand with a kitchen knife in the heat of the moment during a dinner argument. Her passions make it hard for her to lie (though this is resolved in an absurdly funny way), and she becomes a bizarre ally on his quest to clear or nail his wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kathryn, on the other hand, is a more opaque character. She\u2019s significantly more accomplished than George, as she trades blows with her superiors. Arthur Stieglitz (Brosnan) seems to have it out for her \u2014 she\u2019s competition \u2014 and anything that could get her out of his way would be <em>good<\/em> for his personal prospects. As George discovers more information, he starts to wonder if he\u2019s getting played himself: trying to drive a wedge between them, taking the two biggest pieces off the board. The evidence is just too perfect, after all, and the central question comes down to this: does George trust his wife, who is a professional liar, just like him? It\u2019s such a well-crafted idea, taking the normal suspicions that one might get about their spouse after years of marriage and placing them in the most exaggerated circumstances possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The joke I made about Le Carre earlier is more rooted in fact than you might expect. There\u2019s little field work seen and no super-spy heroics here, replaced by small-time fireworks in the barbs that the characters frequently hurl at one another. It is, like Le Carre, never once boring, as the \u201cblack bags\u201d of the title \u2014 referring to the cache of work-related secrets that an intelligence agent must keep from the ones closest to them \u2014 spill open and reveal the frequently-ugly personal shit that accompanies the professional. What keeps <em>Black Bag <\/em>electric is the perfect marriage between Koepp\u2019s writing, the ensemble\u2019s work, and Soderbergh\u2019s dynamic skill as an editor. At 93 minutes, he never has a second to spare, and his ability to create suspense from conversation is put to great use. It feels odd to apply the old saying \u2014 \u201cbrevity is the soul of wit\u201d \u2014 to a dialogue-heavy feature, but the ceaseless momentum that Soderbergh creates in the edit is an invaluable part of the film\u2019s success. It\u2019s shock-and-awe cinema of the most subtle kind, which has been a feature of the director\u2019s work this decade. All I can say is, \u201cMore, please.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp are having a great 2025. After kicking the new year off with Presence, a dope little experiment in first-person spectral voyeurism, they\u2019ve switched gears and gone full Ocean\u2019s 11 mode. I don\u2019t just mean in terms of a heist or con, which is partly what their new film, Black Bag, is about, but how this film appeals to the legacy of 20th-century Hollywood (and, well, the British equivalent). You have show-of-force star power in Michael [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10040967,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[35496,11013,20180,24029,13062,14913],"class_list":["post-10040966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-black-bag","tag-cate-blanchett","tag-film-review","tag-good-movies","tag-michael-fassbender","tag-steven-soderbergh"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&#039;Black Bag&#039; Review: Steven Soderbergh is two-for-two in 2025<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Steven Soderbergh&#039;s &#039;Black Bag&#039; 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