Black Bag - Doppeltes Spiel

Let's be clear: this isn't a bad film. In fact, Black Bag is smart, sleek, and very well-acted. Fassbender and Blanchett deliver exactly what you'd expect from two world-class actors.

The premise? Strong.

The execution? Precise.

The feeling? All head, not enough heart.

As a writer, I usually love dialogue-heavy films. But here, the spy talk becomes so cold and so technical that it starts to feel like everyone in the movie was engineered in the same underground lab. Maybe they are. Maybe that was the point, to portray spies as a single type of personality, with a distinct way of thinking and communicating. If that was the intention, it's executed with precision... but it left me at a distance.

In short, I never really connected to what was at stake.

For me, there is a disconnect between the sophistication of the script and the emotional involvement it generates. The direction is competent and very "Soderberghian": minimalist, efficient, clean. But there are no big surprises that hit you in the gut.

The film wants to be cerebral, and it succeeds at that. Yet this spy thriller feels more like a staged play than a piece of cinema. I kept waiting for a moment of vulnerability, a rupture, an "out of the bag" moment (no pun intended). It never came.

It is a sharp, contained piece of work, and I admire its discipline. But emotionally, it left me outside looking in. Let's say I respected it more than I enjoyed it.

If you like quiet espionage, sharp suits, and even sharper dialogue, you will find some pleasure here. Just don't expect to feel much when the credits roll.

Ninety minutes was a smart limit. Anything longer and it might have started to overstay its welcome.

Would I watch it again? Probably not - but I'm glad I saw it once.

There's just about enough intrigue in David Koepp's efficient script to hold the attention in trying to decipher what is going on in Steven Soderbergh's underwhelming spy thriller which is more like a theatrical play than a cinematic experience.

All of the assembled cast do a sufficient job in delivering a very talky script. I especially liked Michael Fassbender's concise and measured performance as the spy ordered to get to the bottom of a leaked top secret software program that could jeopardise national security where his wife, Cate Blanchett, is one of the suspects.

For me Soderbergh never quite scratches my itch when he attempts to do 'cool' like he did with the Ocean trilogy. There's a cold aloofness that prevents me as a viewer to get completely wrapped up in the story he is trying to tell. Also with Black Bag I wasn't keen on the cinematography which looked like a creative decision to make most light sources seem diffused, presumably to make this look like an old fashioned espionage thriller from the 1960's. Fassbenders character certainly has shades of Harry Palmer to him, especially wearing those trademark black glasses.

Despite it being talky and smart it's not that taut and I would like to have seen a bit more action and a few surprise twists for there to be a better payoff for all the concentration the viewer has to endure to get to a rather mediocre finale.

I find myself increasingly weary of the spy film genre, especially those that center around a romantic couple. It has become a trope so familiar, so predictable, that the very notion of it now feels like an exercise in the mundane. Each iteration feels almost mechanically constructed, as if there is an unspoken formula at play, one that prioritizes style over substance, a kind of cinematic sleight of hand designed to keep the audience distracted from the lack of originality beneath the surface. In this particular instance, however, the dialogue attempts to elevate itself above the usual banter of its kind, but only to the point of indulging in an almost ostentatious, borderline pretentious, air of intellectualism. There's a certain artifice to it all-an effort to sound clever, to sound profound, that ultimately rings hollow. The conversations between the characters, rather than offering any real emotional depth or compelling insight, instead feel like performative displays of wit, which do little more than alienate rather than engage. This was a film that seemed more concerned with showcasing its own perceived sophistication than with crafting any meaningful connection with its audience. And yet, despite all its verbal flourishes, it never once managed to grasp my attention in any truly significant way. The pacing felt sluggish, the stakes hardly compelling, and the emotional core-if one could even call it that-was so underdeveloped it barely registered. In the end, it was less a work of cinema and more an exercise in style over substance, one that never captured my imagination or curiosity.

Yeah, itsss sort of a serious semi-realistic James Bond in high metropolitan life. While I like the artists involved, most of them play it quite well. The main negative entrance in the genre is Cat Blanchet though. She usually plays high drama roles and somewhat ironic twists, doing it very well.

Unfortunately, for me, her role as the dismantled Queen of England in medieval setting overshadows everything else. She absolutely showed sheer brilliance in that movie and a larger than life real woman of real decadence and love of life

Here, she really goes dark every time she tries hard, failing the part badly. Michael Fastbender does well and quietly carries a bit of swagger of investigative mind, but not tto great either. The movie is slow and sort of interesting at times, but so "pretensively modern life" that it leaves me with no choice but to walk out of it.

I have to confess that I have tried my best to sit through watching it, but I failed...gladly.

I don't know why this movie, with several men and women sitting around a dinner table, kept blabbering to each other, would cost and consume 50 million dollars to make. How much did the producers pay each of these actors to sit down? Maybe they spent a lot of the movie budget just for the black plastic glass frame for the guy, even if it looked so unnecessary and so fake on his face?

I have also found that the dialogue of this movie is just so irrelevant to me. I couldn't even understand what it meant, maybe not just to the participant actors who could ingeniously memorize the wtf? Dialogue, but to a lot of the viewers, including me. I have watched some movies with only two actors sitting facing each other and talking from the very beginning to the end, but I found them so interesting and never lost my focus. But the dialogue of this Black Bag, with more people talking to each other, I didn't even know what they were talking about and couldn't care less.

Black Bag (2025) would be one of the most tedious and meaningless movies that I have watched in the last 50 years.

Cate Blanchett didn't age well and did an abysmal facelift job that almost made her unrecognizable and tough to look at.