"It's been a while since we had a traitor to dinner."
Focus Features
It co-stars Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page as their four immediate MI6 counterparts, with a quietly stoic Pierce Brosnan as their gruff superior. Each of the three spying couples or pairings brings their own "baggage" as professional liars who are experts in deceiving one another. Structured in segments of the days of the week before a final game reveals the culprit, Soderbergh delights in a series of deliberate reveals and motives to suggest who could be the duplicitous culprit.
Once again lusciously filmed by Soderbergh himself and written by recent frequent collaborator David Koepp, there are strong literary shades of John le Carré with a whipsmart script that relishes in its messy interpersonal relationship and wastes none of its ninety-four minute running time. While a little too cute in showing off how sharp its own material is, it brings us along for the ride through Fassbender's liar-hating point-of-view search for the treasonous agent.
Fassbender and Blanchett ground the stylish Black Bag through their grounded portrayal of a loving couple who must professionally question each other's true motives while trusting they cannot always trust each other. Soderbergh has assembled an impressive British cast who are delighted to play off each other while constantly lying to protect themselves and national security. It stretches its premise to its limits while embracing frequent contradictions.
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