Review: Black Bag wasn’t Quite My Bag

Steven Soderbergh has worked in the film industry for years, trying his hands at all sorts of genres. He is a great heist movie director. Originally using George Clooney’s talents (the Ocean’s franchise, Out of Sight), he has since moved on to other actors and funnier grifts (Logan Lucky, No Sudden Move). Soderbergh’s heist oeuvre is not about sex but is often very sexy. Nonetheless, directors need fresh ideas and fresh meat, which for this director included an obsession with London and the Home Counties. Although we’re glad to have him, it’s painfully clear that Steven only understands British life through a distinctly Hollywood lens. He recently made an atrocious third Magic Mike movie which did have a neat conceit: high/low wealth disparity with sex as the great leveller.

With Black Bag, Soderbergh leaves behind the working class parts of London to focus exclusively on the aristocracy in a spy caper, think: all received pronunciation accents and Loewe bags.  Starring Cate Blanchett, Black Bag is also Michael Fassbender’s third spy on camera in a year, and for Black Bag, he delivers a stereotypically Le Carré performance. With an intriguing supporting cast, Soderbergh mixes the cream of new British talent with these established stars, so why didn’t this hit?

Fassbender plays George Woodhouse, a very English Intelligence agent whose wife and fellow spook, Kathryn (Blanchett), is suspected of betraying her country. Black Bag asks, where does George’s loyalty lie: to his marriage or his country?

The “black bag” refers to classified ops that are kept separate from different parts of MI6, leading to paranoia and conspiring. And having rich, child-free Gen Xers as the leads works well. As George covertly tries to find out what his wife is doing, he must decide who to trust in his work inner circle, played by Rege-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Naomi Harris and Tom Burke. Three out of four of these are fantastic in their roles, but Harris is tasked with playing a therapist from ‘oop north, like’ and she just cannot sustain the (unnecessary) accent.

Soderbergh excels at mixing classic and modern spycraft, from military surveillance tech to polygraph tests, to weave something novel. An intriguing game is being played in Black Bag, but in the end, Soderbergh, somewhat surprisingly, employs one twist too few.

BLACK BAG will be available exclusively on digital platforms to buy or rent from 14th April 2025, from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.