Black Bag, 2025.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, and Gustaf Skarsgård.
SYNOPSIS:
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Black Bag, arrives on 4K Ultra HD with an accompanying Blu-ray disc and a code for a digital copy. This is a smart, snappy little spy thriller that should have done better at the box office, so help it find a second life on home video. Thanks, fellow film fans!
In an era full of bloated movies, Black Bag’s taut 94-minute running time feels like a refreshing change of pace. That said, the end also left me wanting more. I’m not saying that the film is flawed because it’s only 94 minutes, just that the story could have easily filled two hours without me feeling like it was labored.
That seems to be the way it goes with director Steven Soderbergh: when he’s hitting all the right notes, it’s easy for me to want the symphony to keep going. He has definitely mastered an economical style of storytelling that follows the maxim that you should always enter scenes late and leave them early.
Black Bag is a spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender as cold, calculating UK secret intelligence agent George Woodhouse, who’s married to fellow spy Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). His boss, Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), assigns him to discover who leaked a top-secret piece of software that could cause a nuclear reactor meltdown; Kathryn is among the suspects.
George arranges a dinner with Kathryn and the other suspects: satellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), fellow agent Freddie (Tom Burke; also Clarissa’s boyfriend), and managing agent James (Regé-Jean Page) and his girlfriend, Zoe (Naomie Harris), who’s also a psychiatrist for the agency.
Of course, the dinner is a ruse so George can try to suss out the perpetrator; he drugs the food to make everyone more susceptible, with the okay from his wife. Revelations occur, but none of them are the ones George is looking for. However, when Meacham dies that evening under suspicious circumstances and Kathryn denies having seen a movie when George has found a ticket for it in her wastebasket, George kicks his investigation into overdrive.
The rest of the story consists of a satisfying series of twists and turns that arrive at an ending that I didn’t find unexpected; however, it was a satisfactory conclusion, and Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp leave a nice little thread dangling. Unfortunately, Black Bag didn’t fare well at the box office, but hopefully its run on home video will cement its place among the director’s better efforts.
This 4K Ultra HD edition of the film presents the movie as I imagine Soderbergh wanted it to be shown, especially since he was also its cinematographer under the Peter Andrews pseudonym. (And he edited Black Bag, with the credit given to Mary Ann Bernard; both pseudonyms are in honor of his parents.) You also get a Blu-ray disc, along with a code for a digital copy.
The bonus features are a bit sparse, which isn’t a surprise given the movie’s lackluster performance in theaters; maybe it will get some traction on home video and a more robust edition will surface someday. In the meantime, you get a batch of deleted scenes and a pair of quick featurettes totaling not quite 16 minutes.
The excised footage runs about 6.5 minutes and wouldn’t have really changed the film dramatically if it had been left in; if anything, it reveals too much information, but this is a movie where the audience should always know less than the protagonist as he conducts his investigation.
The featurettes consist of The Company of Talent, which is a pretty standard round-up of the cast offering their thoughts about the film, and Designing Black Bag, in which Fassbender, Brosnan, and Blanchett are joined by costume designer Ellen Mirojnick to discuss the locations and the sets.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
