Director Steven Soderbergh follows up last year’s mediocre Presence with a much better movie in Black Bag, a slick, briskly paced spy thriller.
Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett star as a married couple who work for an intelligence agency under intense scrutiny. When one of them is accused of selling secrets, it sends the couple and their whole team into a freefall until the true villain/villains are revealed.
At a time when so many directors can’t tell a story succinctly—everything is either a very long movie or a miniseries—Soderbergh and writer David Koepp get things right in just 93 minutes. The mystery plays out in a way in which the story seems complete. That said, the characters are intriguing enough to warrant further chapters in sequels.
A sequel isn’t happening yet, but Soderbergh and Koepp have an idea for one if somebody wants to put up the money. The film did OK on a modest budget, making decent money during a short theatrical window.
While it remains in some local theaters, it’s already available for streaming.
Fassbender gets one of his better roles in years, while Blanchett continues to be great in just about anything in which she shows up—and she shows up a lot; it always seems as if she has four or five movies or shows coming out soon.
I hope the story continues. This is the sort of moviemaking that propelled the great films of the 1970s: It’s a well-made, compact, expertly constructed character study that a studio can get behind, because they turn enough of a profit.