Black Bag plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

A Dangerous Game of Whack-A-Mole

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

 Before we get down to cinematics, though, I want to call your attention to the recent passing away of Melody Rygaard Smith, who, along with me, is a proud 1966 graduate of Ball High, Galveston, TX.  Even though others of our classmates have died in ensuing years, I’m paying tribute now just to Melody because awhile ago she found this "famous" blog which led to Facebook messaging on our lives (and attempted sympathy from me as she faced—with the best strength and peace anyone ever could—the early deaths of her daughter and husband a couple of years ago) and frequent public comments from here about some of these rambling reviews of mine, showing herself to be one of the few people worldwide who I'd truly been able to trust had actually read them.  Sadly for me, her last indication of a Like was for my March 26, 2025 review of Sing Sing, then 2 days later she was gone (which I knew about only from some Facebook posts I’m grateful were shared).  She was a wonderful woman, wife, mother (plus many other  designations as a relative), and nurse, bringing consistent joy to so many others who knew her much better than I did.  If you’d like to read a bit more about Melody, here’s the obituary, along with what she often enjoyed in my reviews, a Musical Metaphor, something I know she'd easily sing along to, the Ball High school song and fight song.  May you now rest in peace, dear friend.

   Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)   rated R   94 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: In contemporary London, after a long, well-choreographed tracking shot, we meet a member of a British Intelligence Group, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) who’s told by his boss, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), that a member of his unit, including his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), has stolen a copy of Severus, a dangerous software that has the capacity to blow up nuclear power plants, causing great destruction, so George has just 1 week to find the mole, retrieve Severus, keep horrible disasters from happening.  His initial strategy is to invite the other 4 members of his team, James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), who’s just been promoted; Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), stiff miffed that James got the new status; satellite-imagery specialist Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), who’s currently in a relationship with Freddie; and Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris), an agency psychiatrist currently in a relationship with James.  Unknown to them (but Kathryn’s aware), George has spiked the food with a drug to lower their inhibitions, hoping someone will accidently give away their guilt.  However, all that comes of this is the revelation Freddie’s been cheating on Clarissa so she stabs his hand with a steak knife as the “party” ends.  That same night, Meacham dies at his home of a heart attack while having a drink, a quite-suspicious situation.  Increasing George’s stress, he finds a ticket stub in his bedroom wastebasket for a movie Kathryn claims she hasn’t seen, then she tells him she’s off on a short mission she can’t tell him about (such secrets are kept in the “black bag,” information withheld even from other team members).  After he breaks into her computer to learn she’s in Zurich he browbeats Clarissa to briefly redirect a satellite surveillance so he can watch Kathryn meet with a Russian operative, a move that could prove deadly because that guy’s partner, under constant watch in a safehouse, manages to slip away with the Severus copy, these dissident Russians heading into Eastern Europe to create havoc, kill thousands, with blame going on Putin whom they hope to see overthrown due to a massive uprising.

 To further indict Kathryn into George's escalating suspicions, James tells him she’s used an alias in the past that resulted in £7 million being deposited in a Swiss account under her secret name, then Freddie tells her about George’s concerns about his wife, which leads her to take action using Clarissa to track the Russians while she arranged for a CIA colleague to kill them with a drone as she’s understood Brit agency head, Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan), allowed the Severus clone to escape in order to bring about Putin’s downfall.  By now George and Kathryn have come to trust each other so they bring the other 4 to another dinner party (although by now James has broken up with Zoe), where there is no dinner just a gun on the table with Kathryn’s demand anyone who lies will be shot.  ⇒As tensions progress we learn Zoe and Freddie had an affair, James was working with Stieglitz to leak Severus while Zoe and Freddie were trying us use Kathryn to stop it.  James grabs the gun, admits his guilt and that he poisoned Meacham, tries to shoot George, but the gun just has blanks.  Kathryn’s got a loaded pistol, though, kills James, warns the others to never again interfere with her marriage, then later gives a similar ultimatum to Stieglitz.  Kathryn and George reconnect in the bedroom where she joyfully says the £7 million is still available to her in Zurich.⇐

SO WHAT? When I became aware of this film being available on streaming I was attracted to it immediately for 4 reasons: (1) Soderbergh, (2) Fassbender, (3) Blanchett, and (4) I’ve been saying for the last few weeks how I’m ready to get past reviewing holdovers from 2024, move on to 2025 releases, yet nothing I was aware of in current streaming was attracting me at the same level as a bunch of 2024 4-stars catchups so I was delighted to find something new (just recently opened in theaters, although I’ve read an article about theater owners upset studios are moving their products to streaming before the movie houses have enough time to bring in their own needed profits) so quickly available to virus-aloof me, and, overall, I was pleased with what I saw although I did find it difficult to follow at times, leading to my long-considered 3½ stars-decision.  Along those lines, whenever you’re ready to deal with Spoilers, I’ll refer you to an in-depth analysis of Black Bag (11:33 [ad interrupts at about 3:50]) where the analyst notes similarities to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)—including main characters named George and the desperate need to find the mole within a supposedly-secure team—a film which provided me with one of the first reviews for this blog back on January 6, 2012 (with enough verbiage to choke a horse, poorly broken up in those early days with adequate photos; sorry, but hopefully the comments still hold up) where it also got 3½ stars, even though like with Black Bag I enjoyed it quite a bit; however, as with this current story I felt the structure was frequently a bit difficult to make sense of.*

 

*As I noted in an addition to that long-ago review of Tinker …, one of the problems I had with it was no fault of the film at all but rather poor sound reproduction quality in the theater where I saw it with my wife, Nina, and our regular viewing companion, with all of us having trouble following the plot but still—maybe by osmosis—enjoying what we saw.  Later, Nina and I watched it again in another theater, followed the dialogue much better so I was faced with the challenge of amending my rating.  Even at that early stage of the blog, though, I resolved never to do that because if I decided to reconsider my rating in any one review I’d have to, in all fairness, keep doing that for any/all of them.

 Yes, I know these are more mystery narratives than spy thrillers (like the James Bond intense-action movies, as change is illustrated here by former-Bond Brosnan in a relatively-quiet supervisory role rather than engaging directly in field-action [also, Harris was Moneypenny in recent Bond episodes]) so we’re supposed to be kept off-guard for as long as possible, even when the suspects group is narrowed for us by James admitting to George agents other than Kathryn used that long-ago alias.  It is interesting to try to guess who’s lying and what to believe about the events presented, along with enjoying the expected top-quality acting from the leads, marvelous direction from Soderbergh, but I had to work harder than I preferred in keeping up with it, so maybe, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599),  the fault (“dear Brutus”) is once again not with the(se) stars but with (my)self.

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: As noted above, Black Bag hasn’t been in circulation very long, opening on March 14, 2025 in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters (where it’s grossed $21 million, $35 million worldwide, so far), then it became available on streaming last weekend, where you can rent it for $19.99 from Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.  The CCAL’s enthusiastically ready for you to do so with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 96%, the Metacritic average score at 85%, so maybe you’d better listen to them even more so than me (although I do encourage seeing Black Bag), like the always-dependable James Berardinelli of REELVIEWS, 3½ of 4 stars, offering comments such as: "Black Bag belongs on an Endangered Species list - a spy thriller that relabels on uncovering motivations and unraveling narrative knots to generate suspense. There's nary a car chase to be found nor a shootout to dodge during the course of this lean yarn from director Steven Soderbergh and his recent collaborator, screenwriter David Koepp (they also worked together on Kimi and Presence). More than anything, Black Bag requires attentiveness from its viewers. It demands a level of mental engagement audiences might no longer be accustomed to in a theatrical environment where distracted viewing has become the norm."  Yet, surely you say, there must be some negative reactions, yet they were hard to find so I'll settle for this from previously-unknown-to-me-but-quite-erudite Catherine Springer, who's barely less supportive than me with her 3 of 5 stars: “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.”  Overall, I'm more in harmony with Springer.  

 

 Now, as I conclude, let’s see if you’re in agreement with me on my choice of a Musical Metaphor, Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” (the 8^th time I’ve used this; I must have encountered some unsavory characters over the years of these reviews; it’s on his 1981 solo debut Face Value album) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht2XF2yOj34, due to the absolute distain a team member has for the guilty party with “Well, if you told me you were drowning / I would not lend a hand” notable when the corpse of that guilty one is dumped into the river, because “It’s all been a pack of lies.”  Whatever you might think of this often-mesmerizing film, I think you’ll enjoy Mr. Collins' dynamics.  

            

SHORT TAKES

                 

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

Some options for your consideration: (1) What's new on Netflix in April 2025; (2) What's new on Disney+ in April 2025; (3) What's new on Max in April 2025; (4) What's new on Hulu in April 2025; (5) IMDb's 5 Things to Watch on the week of April 6, 2025 (maybe?); (6) 13 roughly 90 min. movies for when you're short on time (and, seemingly, desperate for something to watch).

 

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