Black Bag review – Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett intrigue in marital espionage

Steven Soderbergh’s spy comedy sends two married agents after a mole, who might turn out to be one of them

The months and years drag on with no new James Bond, no clear indication of how he is to be repurposed as IP. Into this vacuum has rushed a new generation of spy stories on streaming television: action-intelligence office procedurals such as Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal, Slow Horses and indeed The Agency, starring Michael Fassbender, remade from the French show Le Bureau Des Légendes. These are secret agent dramas that give us the violence and the tech, juxtaposing suspected treason and infidelity in the traditional way, but with a new kind of workaday realist sexiness, and more elaborately about showing up for work: much emphasis on ID badges of various security-clearance levels that beep on card readers and can be worn round your neck on lanyards.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp. It is very much part of Soderbergh’s auteur business model: another new movie shot with limber energy on digital – Soderbergh is as much an evangelist for digital as others are for celluloid – whose budget is perhaps largely taken up by fees for the stars whose prestige gets this into cinemas.

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