Black Bag

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Black Bag is the cinematic equivalent of a luxury trench coat: sleek, expensive, and tailored to impress—but when you shake it out, you’ll find it’s mostly air inside. Steven Soderbergh’s latest entry into the spy-thriller genre wants to flirt with ideas of surveillance, mistrust, and marital decay inside the high-gloss world of British intelligence. Instead, it gives us Cate Blanchett doing her damnedest to breathe life into a script that thinks ambiguity is a substitute for substance, and Michael Fassbender smoldering with the emotional range of a granite countertop.

Let’s get the premise out of the way: George Woodhouse (Fassbender) is an MI6 agent on the trail of a mole. His prime suspect? His own wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett), who’s also a top-tier spook. Think The Americans, if they were British, emotionally unavailable, and had zero sexual chemistry.

What could’ve been a gripping meditation on trust in a surveillance state—wrapped around a decaying marriage between two intelligence operatives—devolves into a confused muddle of moody lighting and characters who seem to have wandered in from different films. David Koepp’s script teases political heft but never delivers. There’s talk of betrayal, patriotism, ethics—but it’s all vibes, no venom.

Blanchett, goddess that she is, gamely tries to imbue Kathryn with depth: she slinks, she sighs, she delivers lines like she’s feeding them through a shredder. But even she can’t save a film that doesn’t seem interested in who these people really are. Kathryn should be a feminist antihero for the ages—a brilliant woman in a boy’s club, weaponizing her intelligence, her body, her boredom. Instead, she’s given little more than icy glares and a final act twist that thinks it’s clever when really, it’s just smug.

Fassbender, for his part, glowers, jogs, and occasionally looks like he’s solving a crossword puzzle in his head. His George isn’t a man unraveling—he’s just bored. Which, unfortunately, is how I felt by the halfway mark. Their marriage has the emotional tension of two IKEA mannequins posing as Mr. and Mrs. Bond.

Yes, the cinematography is sharp. Yes, the coats are to die for. And yes, the film moves with the slick efficiency of a Prada ad. But when a movie spends more energy on its tailoring than its storytelling, we’re in trouble. Spy thrillers should feel dangerous. This one feels like a perfume commercial with a vague sense of betrayal.

VERDICT:
A stylish but soulless espionage drama that wastes its stars on a script more interested in aesthetic ambiguity than actual intrigue. Black Bag wants to be Tinker Tailor for the Vogue crowd. What it is, instead, is beautifully wrapped emptiness.

2 out of 5 Molotovs