Black Bag - Doppeltes Spiel

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.

It started off slow and it is difficult to understand their accents in the opening dinner scene, but it finished off strong towards the end. Don't expect a lot of action but good narrative. Fassbender plays a good robot agent that makes Spock look really human. Typical Soderbergh movie with the pacing of an Ocean's 11 type movie but with a lot less comedy and minimal twists and turns. Blanchett and Fassbender have minimal chemistry, but maybe that was more of a lack of character development in the script. Seems like it should have been a Hulu release as releasing it in the big screen seems a waste. They wasted Pierce Brosnan as an actor for his minimal role.

It was one of those movies that's first hard to get into, but once you hit halfway you're invested. It's not that this movie was bad at all, it just didn't hit for me. It felt like a murder mystery, without the murder. It had fun twists and turns and dark at times. Them sitting around the table was the most intense parts, that goes to show you the amount of action in this movie. Just a warning if you're looking for any at all, this has none. Also most of this movie could have been figured out with a conversation between wife and husband, thay apparently trust each other so much. But whatever. Haha

Watched at AMC on 3-13-2025.

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 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.