BLACK BAG REVIEW: A Twisted 'Mr and Mrs. Smith' with Substance [4/5]
Director Steven Soderbergh Puts Life or Death Stakes On A Marriage
[Rating 4/5] - dir. Steven Soderbergh - 2025 - United States - R - 1h 33m - Spy Thriller
It’s no secret that over the course of his career Steven Soderbergh, filmmaking phenom, has been making work that is leaner and leaner.
Despite that — or perhaps because of it — we’ve been getting more material than ever from the legend.
Sure, there’s some less than stellar fare out there, but nothing outright bad, and for a famed hitter forcing himself up to bat this often, he’s got solid numbers.
Career highlights include the emotionally fraught, hot indie film that kickstarted his career in the late 80s, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, his first of several collaborations with mega-celebrity George Clooney, Out of Sight, then Erin Brokovich, then Ocean’s 11, Che, The Informant!, Magic Mike, and on, and on, and on.
Most filmmakers would kill to have a career with even a quarter of the number of successful movies Soderbergh can boast. The man does not tire. He dipped his hands into television before it was cool; he tried out adaptations… And then he brought it all back to cinema, right in the nick of time, one could posit.
Soderbergh is not capable of, nor here to, save cinema, exactly; however, we need creatives like him operating the way he does for as long as possible, because sooner or later, this war of luring generations whose attention spans are broken will end, one way or another.
Does Black Bag, a taut 93 minute re-working of the kind of tense marriage+work+death action thriller that made such a splash with Mr. and Mrs. Smith 20 years ago, really contain the magic necessary to draw a notable number of people back into the cinema? Frankly, no. The emotional scope of this film is no joke, but in terms of setpieces, if that’s what one seeks, they should find the latest Mission Impossible more to their liking. Those films are akin to theme park rides (yes, to an extent, Martin Scorsese was right).
Black Bag isn’t subtle, but it looks that way compared to what commands asses in seats these days.
What can be said about the actors that carry this film, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, respectively, that hasn’t already been said? They have an array of crowd pleasers and critical darlings in their filmographies, can tap most if not all directors to chat and-or work on a project, and they have the awards to prove their talent to people who care about that kind of thing.
“Black Bag”, in this case, is a phrase that serves as a kind of no-go, don’t-ask-questions zone for married couple George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean (Fassbender and Blanchett). They both work deep in intelligence — so deep the aforementioned phrase appears more often than really works for a successful marriage. While it doesn’t initially serve as a strain, it metastatizes into a bigger issue. The nature of their work means secrets are unavoidable, but what if your loved one is a part of your secret? What if you know something about their future you can’t tell them?
This isn’t exactly a morality tale, but that these characters wrestle not just physically but also emotionally with each other makes this more substantial viewing than Mr and Mrs. Smith, which was no doubt fun, but inflated far beyond what reality normally allows because of the celebrity-infected controversies surrounding the making of the film and its promo cycle.
Black Bag is a good bit of fun without losing its adult tone; this is one of Soderbergh’s greatest traits.
Despite all of the deception, and the “adult” qualities I keep reverentially mentioning, this is also living legend Cate Blanchett at her most romantic in years. She typically plays strident, intimidatingly powerful women. Here, she is those things, while also being vulnerable enough to make the romance with perpetually romantic Michael Fassbender actually work. As great as the latter actor is, it really does take the active work of two to create chemistry that comes across on screen and spells L-O-V-E.
Blanchett gives looks to Fassbender in Black Bag that I assumed she’d long thrown out of her acting quiver — so long ago I wondered if they were ever really there.
Fassbender doesn’t deviate much from his typical style, outside of adding just a pinch of Benoit Blanc-meets-Stanley Tucci pizzazz, but that’s not a complaint because he does it well and it serves its purpose. At worst, his performance suffers because of its proximity to his work in David Fincher’s The Killer, an equally spartan spy work.
Black Bag’s plot is not quite incidental, but the allure of this project is the acting and filmmaking skill on display rather than any kind of insightful lesson we as an audience can apply to our lives.
Maybe this is a roller coaster after all, it just makes us think as well as sit on the edge of our seat.
Adult escapism. Soderbergh does it, and does it well.
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Black Bag is out now.
[Rating 4/5] - dir. Steven Soderbergh - 2025 - United States - R - 1h 33m - Spy Thriller