Black Bag

The thing rolling around in my head since seeing Black Bag is how hard it must be to make something that feels as effortlessly cool as this. 

Steven Soderbergh is maybe not the best director currently working.

That’s probably Christopher Nolan or Ryan Coogler or David Fincher or Spike Lee or Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese or Greta Gerwig or Kathryn Bigelow or … or fill in your favorite. 

But Soderbergh is the director who makes the absolute coolest movies around. 

Sort of like how Elvis Costello was the coolest rock star of his generation. Other people had bigger hits or connected better but that guy was cool. 

No I can’t define it or explain it or defend it. It just is. 

Soderbergh’s credits are full of ups and downs and things I sometimes ignored. I really should watch The Knick someday. 

But check out Kimi and Logan Lucky for recent examples of this. And then go back to Ocean’s Eleven. They shouldn’t have ever made a sequel but the first one is incredible. 

Check out The Limey and Traffic and for my money the coolest crime movie ever made, Out of Sight.

Soderbergh remains one of the few directors to properly translate an Elmore Leonard novel for the big screen.

With Black Bag Soderbergh and Writer David Koepp hit the target in every scene. 

For the record, do not go in expecting spy thriller action. This is much closer to John le Carre than James Bond. Or, actually, it’s Agatha Christie but with spies. 

Tight, stylish and thrilling and capped by two exceptional scenes of intimate dinners where where the guests reveal too much. 

Smooth with a lot of talk but in each conversation everyone is working an angle and trying to see where to slip in the knife. 

I loved nearly every second of it and I love that it will pay off again with a repeat viewing. 

That’s because when we get to the end all the secrets are revealed there are one or two moments where I’m going to have to reconsider Michael Fassbender’s performance. What did he know and when did he know it? 

There is a moment three quarters of the way in where he seems devastated. Was he? Or was that an act? 

The rest of the cast simmers and shines with Cate Blanchett settling in somewhere between amused and dangerous for most of the flick. 

The main group of spies Rege-Jean Page, Naomi Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela each bring a particular bit of strength to the film. 

Abela already proved her skills on HBO’s Industry and you can see why she got pulled in here. She’s playing a different flavor of that kind of character. I hope she’s not upset at being typecast cause I would watch her do this particular thing again and again. 

Also, and I really can’t stress this enough it’s a tight 93 minutes. 

Get in, shoot your shot, and get out. 

And if anyone causes a problem they might just end up in the trunk of a car.