Black Bag (2025)

Last week I went with friends to see Black Bag (2025), directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp. At the start of that week, I thought I might just watch something at home instead, since nothing that was playing (including this movie) immediately caught my attention. I saw the film on Sunday evening (3/23/25) at the Cinemark 16 theater in Victorville, CA. When it came to the theater experience, we saw the film in a standard auditorium. At the time of the ticket purchase, it looked like the party of 3 (including myself) would be the only ones in the auditorium, which would’ve been pretty cool. However, once we got to the theater and took our seats, it looked like there were a couple of other groups already seated. We were the only ones in the top row though, and upon reflection, we were probably the rowdiest group by comparison. Often when watching movies with friends, I let a bit of funny commentary out now and then and they would do the same in return. In this case though, I can help but think we were a couple of decibels too high for some of the other people in attendance. I might be overthinking that, especially since I’m writing this a week after seeing the movie, but I tend to complain about other people’s behavior in the theater so I thought I’d call myself out too.

In terms of trailers, we got a few action movies and thriller movies I’m not really dying to see. I might have mentioned The Amateur (2025) with Rami Malleck before, but who knows? Ballerina, or From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025) is, you guessed it, a spin-off movie in the John Wick universe that looks to be an origin movie for Ana de Armas’ character Eve from the mainline movies. The trailer features a couple of tired action trailer tropes: a popular song remixed for the trailer (Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”), reveal of a popular character (John Wick), and an extended action sequence to end the trailer. I enjoyed the first two John Wick movies, skipped the 3rd one, and thought the 4th was okay; I don’t really have a desire to engage with the series any further. Aside from that, I got to see a teaser trailer for M3GAN 2.0 releasing later this year. I had a really good time watching the original M3GAN (2022), so I’ll be looking forward to this. The last trailer I wanted to mention is for The Life of Chuck (2025), directed by Mike Flannigan and based on Stephen King’s novela, If It Bleeds. It looks like the movie will have a stacked cast with Tom Hiddleston in the lead, along with Matthew Lillard and David Dastmalchian. The film is being distributed by Neon, which may be interesting for some as I feel a lot of people associate Neon with horror.

Prior to seeing Black Bag, the only exposure I had to the film was the poster, and hearing snippets of an ad that I would skip through when listening to podcasts. From looking at the poster, and hearing the ad snippets use an action-movie type tone, my thought was that this was a heist movie. In actuality, Black Bag is a spy thriller driven more by dialogue than action. We follow two respected British SIS intelligence agents, husband & wife George and Kathyrn Woodhouse (played by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett respectively). After there is a leak concerning a dangerous secret software program, George is tasked with finding out who is responsible from a list of possible traitors. When George suspects his wife of being responsible for the leak, he is faced with the dilemma of following orders for his country or trusting his wife and investigating deeper. 

Let me be real with you, I don’t feel that I gave this movie a fair shake. I sort of expected this to be a different kind of movie and it took me a little bit to actually figure out what the movie is really about; even then it took me a little longer to be actually engaged with the material, which by that point was over half of the movie’s runtime. The movie is driven by the dialogue, delivered well by the cast. However, as I was pretty distracted and not totally engaged with the movie, I felt that I missed out on quite a bit of detail. I won’t say that I genuinely did not want to watch this particular movie, but on reflection I do feel that I unfortunately might have forced myself to watch something new for the week to have material to write about. Ironically, if this movie wasn’t technically well-made with good performances, I probably would have more to say. A trainwreck of a movie stays in my memory more than a competent movie I wasn’t engaging with. 

That being said, I did (as always) have my notebook to jot down my thoughts afterward and I do have some positives. I really fucked with the cinematography in this movie, particularly the lighting. A lot of the diegetic light sources you would see in shots, be it artificial or natural, appear to be so blown out that they’re practically glowing. By my writing you would think something like this washes out the picture, not the case here as our focal points for each shot are contrasted well against these bright spots and it makes for very striking imagery.

In addition, I see a note in the positives section that just reads “soundtracks”. I didn’t go into further detail in my notebook and between last week and now, I totally forgot what the score sounded like. So as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack composed by David Holmes. I’m no music theorist, but from what I hear, there is a lot of emphasis on bassy jazz instruments mixed with sounds I can best describe as celestial. In that respect it reminds me of the OST for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2002), composed by Harry Gregson Williams. The soundtrack for Black Bag is good stuff; it is subtle & tense, very fitting for the direction of this movie. The last note that I wrote down was “funny facial performances”. To elaborate, I found the reactionary facial expressions from a few of the characters, namely Michael Fassbender's, to be kind of funny. I don’t mean this to say the expressions were goofy and took me out of the movie, but that they provided a bit of levity and helped to humanize these otherwise seriously played characters. 

Before I rate this movie, let me start by saying that I think I’m going to move away from using JUST A MOVIE as a ranking. This was at the suggestion of one of my friends who explained that it can potentially contradict my stated thoughts on a movie prior to revealing the rank and can confuse people on how I really feel about it. As such, I’ll move forward to just using BEST MOVIE EVER and WORST MOVIE EVER for my rankings. I hope this came across okay in my other posts, but I should stress that regardless of how I feel about a movie, I always encourage you to give it a watch yourself and form your own opinion on it. I don’t want to be the definitive voice that prevents you from seeing something you might actually enjoy. That being said, I’m going to give Black Bag a BEST MOVIE EVER. Even though I don’t believe I gave it a fair shake for this first watch, I feel this movie will be much more enjoyable in my second viewing now that I understand the beats and what this movie is trying to accomplish. Today being Sunday and having to report to work tomorrow, I kinda feel like chilling more than watching something new. That being said, my next post will probably be another movie review. Have a good evening!