Black Bag info:
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett
Hello and welcome back to another week here at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com. I’m a few days behind, but Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful moms out there. I hope you had a great day, and I hope your kids pampered you just a little bit… or you could at least pamper yourself a bit while they made you a nice meal. Either way, none of us would be here without you, and we appreciate everything you do for us.
Between a school field trip and a Mother’s Day cookout, we were too busy to make it out to the theaters this week, but thankfully, I was able to find that “Black Bag” was already streaming on Peacock. This is still a pretty recent release, so I thought it would fill the void nicely for this week. But like usual, before I start, I need to get the obligatory spoiler warning out of the way. So, if you haven’t seen this and don’t want to be spoiled, please go to my website and check out my other reviews here. After you watch the movie, you can come back here and read all about it.
“Black Bag” is a hard movie to pin down. It’s sort of a thriller, but at the same time, it could be considered a spy movie, a drama, or even an action flick at times. These same traits also hurt it in the end as it struggled to find an identity. The director, Steven Soderbergh, did a fine job welding his talents and using a fine group of actors to help him drive it home. It was a fun cast as it was a mix of A-listers and up-and-comers. Not every interaction was A+ dialogue, but when they were all together, it was fun… if not lacking something.
Fassbender plays George Woodhouse, an intelligence agent with an unnamed organization. Blanchett plays his wife, Kathryn, and she also works at the same agency. They are both great at their jobs, but George is always on top of his game and will go the extra mile to conclude his investigation. After a great opening sequence where we follow George with one long camera shot, he now has a job to do. Someone within his organization has made a deal with the wrong person, and thousands of lives are at stake. At least that’s what he hears from his ally Philip (Gustaf Skarsgård).
This is where the movie gets interesting. George invites several co-workers over to dinner to try and flush out the one he’s looking for. At the very least, maybe get some intel on them. Besides himself and his wife, the other dinner guests include Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Col. Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), and Dr. Vaughan (Naomie Harris). It’s quite the entertaining dinner party that ends with Freddie getting stabbed in the hand by Clarissa.
So, we have a great setup. We meet most of the characters involved. We know what we are looking for, and we have so many ways this can go. Instead, it went sort of sideways in a way that wasn’t as good as it could have been. As George gets to work on the matter at hand, it very much seems like Kathryn is the driving force behind everything. But wait… the tables are turned, and now it appears that maybe George is being set up. We are thrown off by wondering if Freddie and the others are involved.
Throughout “Black Bag”, George and Kathryn and super loyal to each other, so when the two of them eventually come together, they figure out that they are both being set up and set out to resolve the issue. Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who wasn’t involved much in the story, unfortunately, was the man both high up in the agency and in the know about what was going on. His fleeting appearance in the movie was also glossed over for a resolution as well.
A final fake dinner party brings together all the same suspects again, only this time to reveal that Col. Stokes was the one we were looking for the entire time. Honestly, it wasn’t a big surprise if you paid attention to his conversations throughout the film. So, he’s shot dead, and then we get very little after that. It was so strange that this movie was only an hour and 33 minutes long when there was so much left out.
Overall, it was enjoyable, but it lacked in a lot of areas. The setup was great, and the cast was amazing. Honestly, how the story progressed wasn’t terrible, I just didn’t like it and thought it could have gone several other different ways and been better. Great start, but then sort of a fizzle ending. Because of that, I give this a 6 out of 10.
Ok, that’s it for this week at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com. Have you had the chance to see “Black Bag” yet? If so, what are your thoughts? Do you agree that it could have been better, but it had a great setup? Let me know in the comments below, and I will be back next week with another mindless review of some sort.
