Black Bag for a black time
Well, the gloom of February’s movie Dead Zone has swallowed up March. When the best theater movies for the year have been Last Breath, Unbreakable Boy and A Complete Unknown…its been beyond bleak. Literally, there has not been one single movie that your Average Dude has been truly excited to see and, for most of them, much less than excited to review for you. And Black Bag, yet another star-studded feature film by a well-known and loved director (Steven Soderbergh) is the pickle on top of this crap sandwich of a movie season.
Not much to review but here goes nothing
Steven Soderbergh is no slouch when it comes to film-making. He has 14 Oscar nominations and five wins, including Best Director for Traffic in 2000. That was a pretty great year for Soderbergh, as he was also nominated for Best Director for Erin Brockovich. Crazy.
Soderbergh’s bona fidas established, there was reason for optimism going to see Black Bag. However, it became very apparent fairly early on that this movie was not going to end well…for the audience.
Black Bag boasts some excellent stars to go along with an Oscar-winning director. Michael Fassbender has been one of my favorites ever since I saw him in Band of Brothers. Cate Blanchett still carries celebrity cache even after the tragedy that was last summer’s Boarderlands.
And yet, here we are
Those three names attached to Black Bag were enough to give me more than hope…they gave me expectation. So, my post-movie disappointment and frustration are understandable. When you get a big nothing burger out of a show you expected nothing from, the taste of that burger is what it is. But when you expect a juicy steak and it tastes like sawdust…it’s bitter.
When I say ‘Snoozer’, I mean that literally
I’m giving Black Bag a pretty low review. But to be totally transparent, I didn’t watch the whole movie. I literally fell asleep for a few minutes somewhere in the middle if this slogging, single-tone chore of a ‘thriller’. And when I say single-tone, it wasn’t like a John Wick movie, where the bloodletting barely gives you time to shove some corn in your face, lest you miss something cool. I’m talking about a tone so devoid of energy it was akin to playing white-noise on your headset while working. It was just. that. ssssssllllllloooooooooooooooowwww.
The Positive Take-away
To say something good about Black Bag is kind of a stretch. It’s not that the acting was bad. In truth, I would have found it increadibly hard to play a character that, BY DIRECTION, was supposed to show as little emotion as possible at all times. To Michael Fasbender’s credit, he managed to convey an intense, all-consuming adoration to his co-habitant (the weren’t even married). Blanchett was able to subtly portray a woman who knows her man is a total cuck, yet not demean him TOO much. If that was the goal of this movie, it did it’s job. But here’s the biggest rub…
Just like Drive Away Dolls. Or Mickey 17.
Yet again, Hollywood does the old switcheroo on us. Instead of giving us the tense, whodunnit thriller that the trailer promised, we got a barely fleshed out generic plot that was presented so blandly that I didn’t care enough to try to figure it out before the final reel. Instead, we got a movie about a brilliant, respected, capable yet broken man and a brilliant, respected, capable yet narcisistic woman in a relationship of convenience that seemed about an inch deep (by necessity, I’ll grant you). Nothing to admire. Nothing to aspire to. And very little in this movie to appreciate or remember.
I’m giving Black Bag a disappointing 2.5 out of 5. I’d love to discuss a different opinion if anybody has one. But the Average Dude stands by the score. You’ve been warned not to expect much. Unless that’s your thing.
Not for Nothing
As always, I wait until I’ve seen a movie before reading anyone’s reviews. I saw one reviewer call Fasbender ‘James Band’. That was so good I should have thought of it.
Then, an NPR reviewer called Black Bag ‘a witty, sexy, espionage thriller’. Sexy? Meh, I’ll give it that. There certainly is enough cross-character sexing to add to the ‘intrigue’ (although I found it about as titilating as a prostate exam). But witty and thriller are not words I wouild use to describe Black Bag. So I will say this about the NPR review…consider the source. I said what I said.
Not for nothing 2.0
Go to Google, call up Black Bag 2025 film and click on images. You will see the movie poster, a couple of stills from the movie, and uncountable number of women’s fashion accessories instead of images from the film. Literally, there was not enough in this movie to produce even a handful of press images. That kind of backs up my review. Take that, NPR.
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