A look at Black Bag (M)
Strait-laced British intelligence officer George Woodhouse has been tasked with a top secret assignment.
George (Michael Fassbender) has to unmask a fellow MI5 officer – a mole – who is believed to have stolen and sold a piece of top rated technology to the Soviets.
It’s a software programme called a Severus and because only a handful of his co-workers know anything about the device his circle of suspects is surprisingly small.
Ironically, one of his main suspects is his own wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) who’s a highly ranked operative.
So when Kathryn flies out to Munich to meet a Russian contact everything is filmed and George can hone in on the discussions in the MI5 offices.
Fellow agent Clarissa (Marisa Abela) is a keyboard, screen and computer mastermind.
George hits upon a great scheme to try and unravel the dilemma and pin down the mole.
He and Kathryn arrange the first of two dinner parties in their plush London house where, unknown to the guests, a truth serum has been laced into a side dish.
The four guests include junior agent Clarissa Dubose, the No. 1 computer guru in the office, boozy maverick Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), Europe expert Colonel James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page) and in-house psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris).
It turns out that there’ll be two around-the-table dinners at George and Kathryn’s house with the first the most memorable. One of Freddie’s hands is stabbed through onto the table with a steak knife by an irate colleague when he starts stating his theories.
And it’s here when I started to think about director Steven Soderbergh’s premise.
Surely top British spies must have been suspicious why they’d all been invited to a round-table dinner. Wouldn’t they have suspected something had been added to the food, or even the wine?
Anyway, George continues on with his probes. He goes fishing at his and Kathryn’s little country retreat and invites the two male suspects along –- on separate visits –- to discuss office politics.
Out in the boat they go and as they thrill at the catches of pretty large-sized trout George hears one or two slips of the tongue.
But all this doesn’t seem to have surfaced with George and Kathryn’s section head. And who should we see in that role?
Why ex-James Bond star himself, Pierce Brosnan. But he goes under not a memorable name like James Bond any longer. Here he’s Arthur Stieglitz.
And he’s not out in the world at large with a pistol in a holster under his suit jacket. Arthur is behind a MI5 desk in inner London.
Unsurprisingly George adds Arthur to his list of suspects, but I felt he didn’t really put him anywhere near the top of his list.
Everything comes to a head at the second of Kathryn and George’s around-the-table discussions and it’s Kathryn who unravels the whole thing.
Oh, and what is a Black Bag? Apparently it’s slang for the place secrets are kept. And more melodramatically, it can also be the place where married people find the hidden truths about their very own spouses.
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