Black Bag

 Apparently, Great Britain is infested with top-secret, amoral, nihilistic secret service agencies for whom the end always justifies the means.  In The Lazarus Project, time-traveling agents re-set the world clock every time there is a nuclear holocaust or armaggedon,  Lazarus Project operatives are globe-trotters always in hot pursuit of purloined nuclear weapons.  The Lazarus Project is a cleverly written TV series produced in London; Black Bag, which has a similar premise, is a spy movie also set in the UK.  In Black Bag, the agents are engaged in murder and mayhem to stop a Ukrainian terrorist from planting something called "Severus" in a nuclear power plant.  Severus will bore through the shell of the reactor to set off a cataclysmic chain-reaction, predicted to end the war between Russian and Ukraine but at the cost of 20,000 civilian casualties.  (Severus is a pure example of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" it's the object of intense efforts but nothing more than a plot device with no significance in itself.)  In both The Lazarus Project and Black Bag, the agents who are attractive young men and women have no real outlet for their super-confidential secrets and confessions and all suffer guilt at their misdeeds -- therefore, the characters solace themselves by having incestuous in-house love-affairs.  After all, there is no one else with whom they can share the violence and tragedy of their existences.  

Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) begins with an elaborate and wholly pointless Steadi-cam shot following the hero, George, a stiff fellow with black hornrimmed glasses, into a club after passing through a labyrinth of corridors to encounter a fellow operative who tells him that there is a mole in the group of agents charged with neutralizing Severus.  George is supposed to ferret out the traitor, a problematic task because his own wife, Katherine, (also a spy) may well be the double-agent.  George stages a dinner party for the members of the Severus team and laces the chana masala with truth serum.  This leads to a noisy, and recriminatory, gathering that plays like something from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The couples commence bickering, sexual infidelities are disclosed and ferocious insults exchanged.  George orders the participants to play a game in which they have to announce a resolution, not for themselves but for the person seated to their right.  This leads to more vicious fighting among the various couples until Clarissa, the tech who is expert in surveillance satellites, pins her boyfriend Freddie's hand to the table with a butcher knife.  (Not to worry -- he forgives her.)  An elaborately complex plot follows in which various clues are collected, all of which lead George to the reasonable suspicion that his wife is the Judas.  In this world, when anyone asks a question that is inconvenient to answer, they simply respond with the evasion:  "It's in the black bag."  George, who loves his wife, is met with her denials but, also, the "black bag" evasion.  A satellite is used to gather high-tech evidence and there's an extended scene involving a polygraph test that is confounded by Clarissa "clenching her anal sphincter" -- I have no idea whether this would work, although I assume the screenwriter, the  redoubtable David Koepp, has researched this issue.  (Koepp is a very famous Hollywood writer -- the Jurassic Park films are his scripts as are a number of other Spielberg projects including some of the Indiana Jones pictures.)   After many twists and turns, some aerial bombardment accomplished by a drone in a showy sequence, and several more revelations of sexual misbehavior, George and Katherine order their team to another dinner party, a reprise of the first horror-show in which the identity of the culprit is finally revealed.  Since all evidence points to Katherine, the viewer can be pretty much assured that she is not the mole.  

This is a well-made movie that is always exciting.  The acting is good:  Michael Fassbender plays the mild-mannered George -- he looks like a surrogate for Soderbergh himself.  Cate Blanchett is good as Katherine, a sort of femme fatale.  Much of the script is written in intentionally unintelligible jargon.  This is a  phenomenon that I call the Succession effect.  In the HBO series, Succession many scenes were composed in a rebarbative, nightmare lingo that is spoken so swiftly and confidently that the audience doesn't have time to figure what is actually being said -- you can generally get the tone of the remarks but not their precise meaning.  This is how Koepp has written the script for Black Bag -- people says stuff like "The Sat handover is 3 minutes and 20 seconds just long enough to gather several sigs."  Big chunks of the movie have that tone which the viewer has to interpret as hyper-technical spy-speak for high tech data gathering.  The use of this sort of impenetrable jargon was annoying in Succesion and it's no less annoying (if better justified) here.  The movie is fairly civilized, with intelligent nasty dialogue in the Albee manner, and I thought it was entertaining.  But there's not a lot of there there.