For all of Steven Soderbergh’s status as an elite director in Hollywood, it’s interesting to look back at his filmography and note that, ever since he broke out with Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989 and established himself as an A-lister in 2000 with Traffic and Erin Brockovich, the only Soderbergh films that people have talked about since have been the pair of Magic Mike films and the Ocean’s trilogy.
But what makes Steven Soderbergh one of the most interesting directors in Hollywood is that he doesn’t seem to mind if nobody is talking about him. He is a filmmaker who is seemingly driven by
his own creativity and not by commercial incentive. Soderbergh, for example, was the first elite director to shoot an entire film on an iPhone, which was the horror film Unsane in 2018. [Interesting note: the first major director to shoot a film on an iPhone was Sean Baker, who made the low-budget indie Tangerine in 2015. Yes, this is the same Sean Baker who just won four Oscars, including Best Picture, for Anora.]
Soderbergh has also experimented with every genre and platform, even co-producing the COVID Oscars in 2021, proving that he’s up for any challenge, and not afraid of possible negative consequences. His status in Hollywood remains undiminished however, and he can still choose his own projects, which is a luxury not afforded many in this town.
So, knowing that Soderbergh can do pretty much anything he wants, it’s nice when he returns to what he does best, even if it still makes us long for the simpler and more fun days of yore. The Ocean’s trilogy is, of course, what Soderbergh is still most famous and beloved for, Ocean’s Eleven from 2001 being the best of the bunch. Its slick, stylish, breezy, fun and uncomplicated heist film featured a bevvy of movie stars at their best, including a never-better George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle and Casey Affleck in an unendingly re-watchable movie that re-defined cool for a new generation.
In Soderbergh’s new film, Black Bag, it’s hard to not reminisce about Ocean’s Eleven, as Soderbergh does play some of the old hits, but it’s just not as much fun as it used to be.
Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender as a British spy, who is tasked by his agency with rooting out a mole in his elite secret department, and the short list of suspects includes his wife, played by Cate Blanchett. They are happily married, so the assignment is a difficult one, but Fassbender’s cold and calculating character puts equal suspicion on the others on the list, who are played by Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, and Marisa Abela. It is a fun game of cat-and-mouse, as one spy tries to root out another, but the film gets too bogged down in its own cleverness, as the audience loses track of all the games the characters are playing with each other, making the film more of a mental mush than a stylish sizzle.
I have no problem at all with what Soderbergh is going for here, an adult film that leans into dialogue over action and brains over brawn, but screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible) goes a little too heavy on the nuance and over-relies on character tropes to carry through the story: the arrogant alpha male, the overthinking therapist, the smarter-than-everyone-in-the-room youngster, the nerdy-but-sweet overweight guy who nobody thinks can pull the hot girl, and, of course, Fassbender and Blanchett. Fassbender and Blanchett have seemed to have fallen into the same roles lately. Fassbender now only plays cold, robotic, unemotional and calculating geniuses, while Blanchett is most comfortable playing the sexy, seductive, complicated enigma who keeps everyone guessing. The tropes drive the story when it really should be the other way around. But, in Soderbergh’s world, it’s more about the atmosphere and the style of the film than the story, and the style and vibe in Black Bag is very much that of a cool, professional, adult spy world where there are no children, no complications of real life of any kind, for that matter—just beautiful houses, beautiful offices, beautiful wardrobes, and massive real-world implications to their actions, of course.
With all of that, Black Bag really should be more fun than it is. There are moments when the black comedy that I think it’s intending to be slips through, but, for the most part, it plays flat and super-serious, and just doesn’t work. It tries (not too hard) to be sexy, it tries (not too hard) to be a spy film, and it tries (not too hard) to be a mystery, but it doesn’t work fully on any level. In fact, the big ending plays more like Agatha Christie than James Bond, and doesn’t earn the abrupt ending that seems to come out of nowhere.
Of course, I really shouldn’t complain about the fast resolution because one of the best parts about Black Bag is its quick, 90-minute run time, which is a true gift these days from a prestige filmmaker. But a short film means a script that needs to be taut, and with a movie as dialogue-heavy as this one, each line needs to be purposeful. The audience can’t be left to fill in massive gaps in plot just because of time restraints or style choices. Black Bag tries to do way too much in too little time, and it becomes its own downfall. Even though I loved the brevity of the runtime, I would have preferred the film to be longer to allow it a little more time spent fleshing out the story in order to make it all a bit more satisfying—and a lot less forced.
Still, Soderbergh continues to rack up the style points, and his cast is loaded with suave, top-of-their-game actors who came to play in Soderbergh’s spy genre sandbox and fully commit to the sport. Kudos to Abela, fresh off her portrayal of Amy Winehouse in the disastrously-received biopic Back to Black, for bouncing back and proving she’s versatile and can weather the storm, and to Page, for proving his inclusion in the next James Bond casting discussions are warranted. I had never considered the breakout star of the popular Netflix period soap opera Bridgerton a legitimate contender to be the next 007, but, after seeing him in Black Bag playing a nasty, duplicitous and super sexy secret agent, I think they just might be onto something. And, of course, Naomie Harris, already a veteran of the Bond franchise, having played Moneypenny in the last three Bond films, doesn’t need to prove her spy cred, and neither does Pierce Brosnan, who makes a welcome and effective appearance as the big boss.
The cast is great, the look is great, the runtime is great, and the all-around attempt is noble, but, somehow, Black Bag just cannot complete the mission, at least not without some collateral damage.
Black Bag opens March 14, only in theaters.