The film opens with George (Michael Fassbender) in a nightclub. The music pulses, the light is low and flickering, and everything feels just as opaque as it should in a film like this. He’s there to meet a source. It’s the kind of opening scene that instantly sets the tone: everything matters, and nobody 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, whom we know from Traffic, Contagion and Ocean’s Eleven, does here what he does best: he strips a genre down to its purest form. Not nostalgically, not postmodernly — just pure. Black Bag is a spy thriller that bubbles over with plot, yet never loses its grip on the bigger picture.
A duo 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 omissions. Cate Blanchett plays his contact — or does she? — and she has that way of looking at him, as if she has already foreseen what he’s going to do long before he has thought of it himself.
Their chemistry is so sharp you can almost see the cigarette smoke between them, even when they’re not smoking. They have that mature state of tension, as someone would probably call it in an interview press kit, and it’s true. It feels real.
But Fassbender… we need to talk about that accent.
An accent in free fall
It starts out British. Or Irish. Maybe both. But at some point — around 38 minutes in — Fassbender begins to sound like a tired bartender from Brooklyn, and it feels a little as if he gives up on it himself along the way. You sit there thinking: “Was that the plan?” and “Why is nobody correcting him?” But you forgive 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 get this out of the way: Pierce Brosnan is in it. He plays something along the lines of “head of the department.” He enters, says three lines 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… irrelevant. And that’s almost more disappointing. It feels like money that could have been spent better. 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 to say. It’s not just about surveillance and double agents. It’s also about trust. About choosing sides when you no longer know where your side actually is. That sounds like a cliché — but the film turns it into something human.
And then there are the supporting characters — especially Naomie Harris as a sharp, uncompromising investigator with far too little screen time. She steals the scenes she’s in, and proves that the film also knows how to cast without making a fuss.
