Black Bag

Whether fair or not, every spy film released will always find themselves being compared to either the likes of Bond, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and so finding new ways to describe them becomes an ever shrinking circle of tired metaphors and over extended analogies. With this in mind, it does strike one as interesting watching Black Bag in the immediate weeks after the announcement that the stewardship of Bond is being handed over to the corporate evil tyranny of Bezos’ empire of control, with an ever present worry that the solid stalwart of the spy genre is very quickly going to lose it’s status symbol as the bar to which any others in the genre should aspire. Black Bag is a curious film, never trying to go for the action of Bond, but the quiet assertiveness of Le Carré’s work, often to an entertaining ending. It doesn’t ever quite live up to the sharp twists of it’s idol’s work, each divergence of it’s plot feeling rather apparent from the beginning of the show, but there’s an undeniable joy in watching a pool of very talented actors elevating a script that in any other hands, would be as ineffective as a real Lotus submarine.

Fassbender, fresh off a return to the Hollywood stage in 2023 after a hiatus racing cars, brings his usual charisma to a role balanced on a knife-edge of falling into cliched boredom. Facing off against the immutable Cate Blanchett is an almost guaranteed support, with both actors fully developing their on screen relationship to the most believable part of the story, so much so that the central mystery never quite grows legs because they carry too much chemistry. And the wider cast is thoroughly entertaining to watch along side them, never quite reaching the top line heights of Tinker Tailor’s constant unnerving questioning of it’s characters, but doing a good job of obfuscating the motives just enough to make the mystery worth unravelling. And if for no other reason than to try and place which half of the country Naomi Harris’ accent is meant to be from, from sentence to sentence.

Realistically, the likelihood is that this film will not be remembered in ten years time, the lack of any defining marketing campaign implying that the studio didn’t overly believe that it would be either, but there is an almost slight delight in being one of the few who has actually seen it in it’s opening release. It also acts as a solid demonstration of why Steven Soderbergh’s skill is ever constant; the pairing of this and Presence earlier in the year proving that he can adapt his skill to a myriad genres, flexing muscles that few other film makers are able to say that they share. And if anything else, watching this left me wanting two things; a Gary Oldman-led adaptation of Smiley’s People, and Soderbergh to give us Oceans 14.

In short, entertaining, if not definably memorable.