Steven Soderbergh has long been praised by critics and peers alike for making "avant-garde" films within the Hollywood big-budget system. He employs major stars but puts them in small-scale dramatic situations, often revolving around crime or unsavory situations; just look at how he has Channing Tatum return to his male-stripper roots in Magic Mike (2013), or Daniel Craig briefly drop his 007 suaveness for Logan Lucky (2017). Yet despite his indie-darling persona, and his great films that include those two romps, Soderbergh misses as often as he hits; outings like No Sudden Move (2021) pull in fun ensemble casts but then squander the big-name actors on poor pacing, headache-inducing camera effects, and unearned twists.

Soderbergh's newest movie, Black Bag, suffers the same pacing, filming, and storyline issues to which the director is prone. But it's not his worst, and is enjoyable enough — as most British-accented spy fare tends to be.

The thriller opens with British intelligence agent George Woodhouse learning that his wife, Kathryn, is one of only five suspects for a top-secret investigation into the breach of a software called Severus. Kathryn is a fellow spy, yet the two enjoy a famously unshakeable marriage thanks to their utmost trust for one another and crystal-clear boundaries. For example, even though their jobs involve plenty of classified information, they're able to seal away the most important factoids in the metaphorical "black bag" and the other trusts their judgement. So when Kathryn is implicated in potential wrongdoing, George is unnerved. 

He plays it cool, though, inviting the four other suspects (all also colleagues) and Kathryn to a dinner party. Fueled by plenty of wine (and a healthy dose of a truth serum spiking their dishes), tensions rise. Infidelity, jealousy, kinks, and other dirty secrets are exposed, and the party comes quickly to an end when surveillance specialist Clarissa stabs her cheating boyfriend Freddie in the hand with a steak knife. George watches events unfold, silent other than the occasional ribbing, clearly weighing the guilt of his four coworker suspects and wife. 

After that high-stakes first scene, much of the rest of the film unfolds in patterns familiar to the genre. Someone is double-crossed; someone is collaborating with the Russians (and the Ukraine war is explicitly invoked, as it was in the latest season of White Lotus); someone orders a drone strike; someone spies on someone's spouse; someone uses a forged Swiss bank account. Later, we match the same adrenaline of the first dinner in a climactic lie detector scene, but mostly the conversations are dry and low-stakes. 

Much of that is the fault of the leads, who Soderbergh fails to use to their full potential. George is played by Michael Fassbender, who we saw in a much more intense, intimidating, and ultimately interesting version of the same tactical operative in David Fincher's The Killer last year. Kathryn is a steely Cate Blanchett, who musters neither the smarts nor the sex appeal to convince us of her potential masterminding. And Pierce Brosnan appears as the hard-nosed agency boss, but the casting is too on-the-nose and never delivers on the James Bond promise he invokes. In one scene that's supposed to pack a punch, Brosnan mostly just looks bewildered, as if wondering (just like us) why he's in the movie.

The supporting cast, too, is middling at best. Naomie Harris plays Zoe Vaughn, the agency's therapist, whose dialogue is mostly rooted in flat-footed relationship drama with her boyfriend James, played dully by Regé-Jean Page. Tom Burke's Freddie is too bumbling to sell his managing agent potential. Only Marisa Abela, who plays the satellite operator Clarissa, has real panache, imbuing her role with plenty of quirk and charm but standing ground against bigger personalities in the room with her. It's no coincidence that her character is the one that does the dinner-table stabbing.

Aside from the performances, some of Soderbergh's characteristic stylistic choices are satisfying, such as the goofy 20th-century spy music that plays throughout (scored by the director's long-standing collaborator David Homes) or quick cuts between characters deliberately undermining their believability in the aforementioned lie detector scene. But some more choices are half-baked. For example, the film opens with "LONDON" announcing the location in big letters (as is customary in spy fare), but never uses a city nameplate again. Plus, every character we meet is British — and walking around a place that looks like London — so the exposition was pretty clear. Other choices are downright distracting, such as some camera lens (or After Effects filter?) that adds gaudy auras to lights in every scene. LEDs in an office, TV screens during a surveillance mission, street lamps in Zurich, cabs in London; all are ringed with ugly, blurry light. Especially when the cinematographer is Soderbergh himself (as his moniker Peter Andrews), one wonders why he made the choice.

Ultimately, though, it's hard to regret watching Black Bag. Coming in at a tight 94 minutes prevents the plot from getting that deep, but also delivers a snappy thriller easy to watch on a weeknight without staying up too late. Just don't expect a payoff like Ocean's Eleven.