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"Will There Be a Mess to Clean up?" "Only if We Do it Right"
Something is brewing at the NCSC ("Making the UK the safest place to live and work online"), a division of the GCHQ, which is a branch of British Intelligence. Even before the titles come up, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is called to an off-site meeting with his boss, Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård—another one! A month of movie releases can't go by without one with a Skarsgård in it) who informs him "we have a traitor in our midst" regarding a very hush-hush program called "Severus" and Meacham wants him to find the "mole" and "ferret" them out. "Give me two weeks" says George. Meacham replies "If Severus is deployed as intended, thousands of people will die."
"Okay," says George. "One week."
It will be that kind of movie.
George, you see, is a highly-regarded agent at intelligence. And so is his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) and he is absolutely devoted to her, as she is to him. But, we've seen enough movies with husband/wife teams in the same professions where vows and oaths clash enough that they can hasten the expiration date of "'til death do you part." And in the spy game, trust is everything, depending on verifiable proof. In the marriage game, trust is usually handled in another department and hemisphere of the brain.
And George has been informed by Meacham that his wife is one of the suspects. Oh, bother. That can tests one's concepts of loyalty, what? But, being a punctilious sort he begins his investigation by inviting the suspects over for dinner, prepared by him, and with the added ingredient being a drug to lower everyone's inhibitions—he has a reputation of being able to catch anyone in a lie—and that gets an amused admonition from his wife ("Darling, you must not dose our guests."), but, as we know, he only has a week.
The dinner guests include the agency's psychiatric analyst Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), her boyfriend and agent, Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), his counterpart Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and his girlfriend, satellite imagery specialist Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela). All work together for the agency for the head of the department Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), but all that really gets revealed at dinner is that Freddie, as is his way, is cheating on Clarissa, which results in her stabbing him in the hand with a steak knife. It is only one of three violent acts in the film, but it gets George no closer to the truth.
And he hasn't begun to investigate his wife, yet. As she was preparing for dinner, she happened to mention that she liked it when he watched her, but, she has no way of knowing how far that will go. He finds out her schedule—she's traveling to Zurich on business—and persuades Clarissa to temporarily way-lay a satellite and discovers that Katheryn is meeting a Soviet operative there. James informs him that she's got access to a Swiss bank account with £7 million in it and that a highly-placed colleague of the fellow she there has gone missing. Perhaps most alarmingly, Meacham—his boss who gave him the assignment of "finding the rat"—has unexpectedly died of a coronary. Things are happening pretty fast.
But, then it's a Steven Soderbergh movie. Black Bag is the second
film he's directed film to be released in three months (the earlier one was Presence, also written by David Koepp), and it is more in the style of Soderbergh's caper movies (the "Ocean's" films, Logan Lucky, or Out of Sight), although slicker and with more of a professional veneer given the spy/thriller setting. It's stylish, witty, but with an underlying smartness that might leave some watchers in the cold. Things get complicated, red herrings abound, and if you're not paying attention, you could get lost. But, the spy vs. spy bubble the movie moves in gives it a certain edge where you're not sure whose side anybody's on at any given moment.
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