The film opens with George (Michael Fassbender) at a nightclub. The music pulses, the lights are low and flickering, and everything feels just as opaque as it should in a film like this. He's there to meet with a source. It's one of those kind of opening scenes where you immediately sense the tone: everything has meaning and no one says what they mean.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Steven Soderbergh, as we know from Trafikat, Contagion and Ocean's Eleven, here's doing what he's best at: he's making a genre absolutely pure. Not nostalgic, not postmodern -- just pure. Black Bag is a spy thriller that boils over of plot but never loses track.
A mate couple with chemistry
Michael Fassbender plays (of course) an agent who has seen too much. A man with his shoulders up around his ears and a past dripping with concealment. Cate Blanchett plays his contact -- or is she? -- and she has that way of looking at him as if she's already anticipated what he's going to do long before he's even thought about it.
Their chemistry is so sharp that you can almost see the cigarette smoke between them, even when they're not smoking. They have mature state of excitement, as someone would probably call it in an interview-press kit, and that's right. It feels real.
But Fassbender... we're going to have to talk about that accent.
An accent in free fall
It starts British. Or Irish. Maybe both. But at one point -- about 38 minutes in -- Fassbender starts sounding like a tired bartender from Brooklyn, and it feels a bit like he's giving up on himself along the way. You sit and think, 'Was that meant to be? ' and “Why does no one correct him?” But one forgives it because he delivers the rest of the role with so much presence and bodily unease that you can't look away.
Pierce Brosnan. Why?
Let's take it now: Pierce Brosnan is in. He plays something like “chief of the department”. He enters, says three sentences and stares into the camera like a man who has just read his script for the first time. He's not bad. He's just... indifferent. And that's almost too bad. It feels like money that could have been better spent. Maybe on another scene between Fassbender and Blanchett. Or on a better dialect coach.
A thriller with substance
The most impressive thing about Black Bag is that it actually has something at heart. It's not just about surveillance and double agents. It is also about trust. Choosing sides when you no longer know where your side really is. It sounds like a cliché -- but the movie turns it into something human.
And then there are the side characters — especially Naomie Harris as a sharp, uncompromising investigator with far too little screen time. She steals the scenes she's in and is proof that the film also knows how to cast without making it big.
