Black Bag

13 years after announcing his retirement, Steven Soderbergh is busier than ever. Black Bag is his second film out this year — it arrives just two months after his unconventional ghost story Presence – and marks his third collaboration with prolific screenwriter David Koepp. And it’s tremendous fun: think Ocean’s 11, if they were spies. As with his earlier Vegas-set escapades, Soderbergh’s camera is cool and confident; his handsome A-list cast are slick, sardonic and immaculately dressed; Koepp’s script is punchy and sharp, full of mile-a-minute back-and-forth rat-a-tat dialogue; and there’s a light, fizzy David Holmes soundtrack, too.

It is even partly plotted like a heist, narratively doling out just enough morsels to keep us, the viewer, on the hook. Our hero here is a turtlenecked George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender, as restrained and precise as he was in The Killer), an icy George Smiley-coded operative in a British espionage agency. His mission becomes clear within the first five minutes: he must find the traitor in his agency, with a list of names listing the possible suspects — a list that includes his beloved wife and colleague, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).

Its pleasures lie in the dialogue, the twists, the reveals.

The suspects are hastily assembled for an unsuspecting evening meal, with truth serum laced into one of the side dishes, leading to secrets and lies quickly emerging; like the diner scene in Heat or the poker scene in Casino Royale, Soderbergh deftly makes “people sitting around a table” feel dynamic and thrilling. A steak knife gets involved. From this disastrous dining experience onwards, tangled webs beget tangled webs, as we learn not to trust anyone, from George’s snivelling underlings (Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page) to their secretive partners (Naomie Harris, Marisa Abela).

A film about British spies immediately invokes a certain agent with a license to kill, a comparison Soderbergh openly invites with the meta-casting of an actual Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and longtime bookie’s-favourite-Bonds (Fassbender, Page). But Koepp’s script keeps things psychological and internal, probing the motivations and inclinations of these highly skilled but deeply flawed “professional liars”. What does it do to a psyche, the film ponders, to have secrets as your daily bread?

So there is very little in the way of action, if you were expecting that, and while it occasionally genuflects towards genre — there is a very silly-sounding MacGuffin called ‘Severus’, a deadly cyberweapon which all these types of films must have, by law — its pleasures lie in the dialogue, the twists, the reveals. It all leads to a delightful Agatha Christie-style drawing room denouement, in which the rat is exposed, their best-laid plans laid to waste. Like the film as a whole, it’s deliciously, lip-smackingly satisfying.