Count Steven Soderbergh as one of those hard-to-stereotype and prolific American directors with a chameleonic dial-a-style approach each time he hits the screens. The director launched his career with a shoestring budget indie sensation, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and has since swerved through a dizzying variety of genres and positions on the art film versus popcorn movie index. He has shown his skill with mainstream movie polish via the Ocean's Eleven and Magic Mike franchises, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich, but also taking left turns into artier turf with Kafka and Unsane.
What we have learned over the years and through his filmography is that a new Soderbergh film is always worth watching, a habit newly bolstered by the entertaining “who done it” (and “who done what to whom”) new spy thriller Black Bag. In an odd way, Soderbergh’s latest (written by David Koepp, also behind Soderbergh’s 2022 film Kimi) manages to blend the witty and crisply choreographed caper-ish quality of Ocean's Eleven with his less commercial gray area character studies. He has it both ways.
As viewers looking for a casual but engaging Tuesday-night film outing, we also get it both ways. In this taut, almost Agatha Christie–like story maze about British spies, lies, and digitalscapes, the entertainment factor is cleverly twofold. We are both drawn into the interpersonal puzzle of its espionage-bathed characters while kept at an arm's length, as objective observers of the story-gaming at hand.
