Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp are having a great 2025. After kicking the new year off with Presence, a dope little experiment in first-person spectral voyeurism, they’ve switched gears and gone full Ocean’s 11 mode. I don’t just mean in terms of a heist or con, which is partly what their new film, Black Bag, is about, but how this film appeals to the legacy of 20th-century Hollywood (and, well, the British equivalent). You have show-of-force star power in Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Rege-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, and Pierce Brosnan, as well as appearances from the two best-kept secrets of the modern UK scene in Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even better, each performer can be fiercely charismatic. If Soderbergh has finely honed one skill for use in his mainstream projects, it’s that he knows how to make an actor into a “movie star” without it coming across as puffery. As such, Black Bag is a thoroughly entertaining spy comedy-thriller, a take on the Le Carre espionage world if all the old men in dim and smokey rooms were young, hot, and having plenty of illicit sex with one another.
A lot of credit should go to Koepp, a much-maligned screenwriter who has penned or co-written genuine classics (Jurassic Park, Snake Eyes, Carlito’s Way, War of the Worlds) and some miserable failures (the last two Indiana Jones movies, two Dan Brown adaptations, and the Tom Cruise Mummy). His recent partnership with Soderbergh, which began with Kimi in 2022, has seemingly unchained his creativity — understandable since he’s been freed from the clutches of Amblin, Lucasfilm, and star/producers like Cruise. His script has a high-concept logline — George Woodhouse (Fassbender), a married MI6 agent, is led to believe by a colleague that his wife, Kathryn (Blanchett), may be a mole — and innovates on it at each turn. The moral turns out to be something like “Don’t shit where you eat, but if you do, be married to Cate Blanchett,” which as solid of advice that one can give, but the twisty, turn-filled execution of Koepp’s plot is delightful, full of Last of Sheila-like parlor games that lead to darker revelations about their participants.
For a spy, George is painstakingly devoted to the truth. That doesn’t mean he has scruples — a master of reading people, constantly concocting scenarios to get his targets to reveal themselves —. Still, he is devoted to pursuing the facts to the bitter end, almost as closely as he hues to his wedding vows. He and Kathryn aren’t Bond-types, wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am-oh-I-guess-you’re-dead-now-ing their way through a series of occupational hazard-conquests: They are suspiciously faithful to one another, which their colleagues frequently point out to them. It’s a foreign concept to guys like James (Page), who is currently dating Zoe (Harris), the agency’s psychologist, or Freddie (Burke), a playboy type who is a certifiable sex addict, having all those annoying side-effects that James Bond never seemed to pick up in the form of kids and long-term partners. His latest, Clarissa (Abela), is a bit younger than him, but she’s about four times as smart, and George recognizes her as a throughly honest person — especially when she stabs Freddie’s hand with a kitchen knife in the heat of the moment during a dinner argument. Her passions make it hard for her to lie (though this is resolved in an absurdly funny way), and she becomes a bizarre ally on his quest to clear or nail his wife.
Kathryn, on the other hand, is a more opaque character. She’s significantly more accomplished than George, as she trades blows with her superiors. Arthur Stieglitz (Brosnan) seems to have it out for her — she’s competition — and anything that could get her out of his way would be good for his personal prospects. As George discovers more information, he starts to wonder if he’s getting played himself: trying to drive a wedge between them, taking the two biggest pieces off the board. The evidence is just too perfect, after all, and the central question comes down to this: does George trust his wife, who is a professional liar, just like him? It’s such a well-crafted idea, taking the normal suspicions that one might get about their spouse after years of marriage and placing them in the most exaggerated circumstances possible.
The joke I made about Le Carre earlier is more rooted in fact than you might expect. There’s little field work seen and no super-spy heroics here, replaced by small-time fireworks in the barbs that the characters frequently hurl at one another. It is, like Le Carre, never once boring, as the “black bags” of the title — referring to the cache of work-related secrets that an intelligence agent must keep from the ones closest to them — spill open and reveal the frequently-ugly personal shit that accompanies the professional. What keeps Black Bag electric is the perfect marriage between Koepp’s writing, the ensemble’s work, and Soderbergh’s dynamic skill as an editor. At 93 minutes, he never has a second to spare, and his ability to create suspense from conversation is put to great use. It feels odd to apply the old saying — “brevity is the soul of wit” — to a dialogue-heavy feature, but the ceaseless momentum that Soderbergh creates in the edit is an invaluable part of the film’s success. It’s shock-and-awe cinema of the most subtle kind, which has been a feature of the director’s work this decade. All I can say is, “More, please.”