Black Bag
It's hard to believe now, but a little over ten years ago, director Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from filmmaking. It didn't take long, however for that ‘retirement’ to become a ‘sabbatical’, and the intervening decade has seen him release no fewer than ten feature films since 2017, making him arguably the most prolific auteur currently working in the film industry. While many big-name directors remain committed to shooting on traditional film formats, Soderbergh's renaissance has seen him fully embrace digital technology. He has even gone so far as to shoot two of his more recent projects entirely using Apple iPhones. It's perhaps this willingness to go all-in with new tech which has enabled him to produce his recent run of slick, high production value movies on relatively limited budgets.
Soderbergh's latest release, Black Bag, is his third collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp. It plunges into the backroom skulduggery of the United Kingdom's intelligence agency, MI6, investigating a missing top-secret nuclear cyberweapon. The film features an ensemble cast headed by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as husband-and-wife intelligence officers George and Kathryn Woodhouse. A growing web of suspicions and sexual tensions develops between a small group of fellow officers whom George has been tasked with investigating. It seems that treachery is afoot at MI6's London headquarters, and George must use all the skills at his disposal to unmask the traitor.
In recent years, screen depictions of the British secret service have shifted markedly. The bow-tied, vodka-martini-swilling machismo of James Bond has been supplanted by grubby, foul-mouthed antiheroes, as in Apple TV's Slow Horses. In a certain sense, Black Bag could be seen as somewhat retro. Soderbergh's protagonists — particularly Fassbender & Blanchett's flagrantly monogamous power couple — are dressed as if they just stepped out of the pages of Vogue and GQ magazines. The film's casting even nods knowingly in the direction of the Bond franchise. With Naomie Harris (formerly Miss Moneypenny) as the Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan, and Pierce Brosnan — erstwhile James Bond himself — as division boss Arthur Stieglitz, the homage is complete.
The script — despite being light on action and somewhat heavy on dialogue — is lean, snappy, and filler-free. It is possessed of an acidic wit which keeps the film taut and energetic throughout its punchy 90-minute runtime. Soderbergh makes a superb job of directing his well-chosen cast just enough to let their personalities fill the screen: a wise choice in a tense, up-close-and-personal thriller like this. Performances are first-class across the board – particularly from Blanchett, who is clearly having the time of her life. Kathryn is a slinky, vampish femme fatale in spite of her status as a happily married woman. Fassbender is the tightly-wrapped, quietly efficient George, his suspicious eyes glinting like gimlets through his Harry Palmer glasses.
In these days of bloated, three-hour-long, $500 million franchise movies, Black Bag serves as a healthy reminder that more is not always more. In some cases, brevity really is the soul of wit, and Steven Soderbergh has served up an object lesson in perfectly-formed efficiency. Black Bag is a wiry, effortlessly slick, one-two-punch of a movie which gets in, does the job, and gets out quick before it outstays its welcome. It's uncertain how long the director's ‘purple patch’ will continue, but if he continues to fire out entertainment of this quality, it could be quite some time yet.
Mickey 17
It's been six years since South Korean director Bong Joon Ho came to international attention by winning the Academy Award for best picture with his savage black comedy and social satire, Parasite. It was the first non-English-language film ever to win the coveted best picture Oscar. The overarching theme of Bong's career to date has been unashamedly left-leaning social commentary, frequently employing dark, dystopian humor to illustrate class inequality and the greed of elite social groups. His first English language film, Snowpiercer, used the claustrophobic setting of a permanently-moving train in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to tell the tale of a working-class revolution in microcosm.
Bong returns to a similarly dystopian, futuristic setting with his latest picture, Mickey 17. The year is 2050, and failed entrepreneur Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is forced to resort to desperate measures to escape the murderous henchmen of a rapacious loan shark. He and his friend Timo owe an exorbitant amount of money, and in a spur-of-the-moment decision, they sign up for a space colonization mission. Headed by disgraced politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his ghastly wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), they are headed to the remote ice planet Niflheim. Timo becomes a pilot, but the hapless Mickey, failing to read the small print in his contract, signs up to become the ship's ‘expendable’.
Using technology outlawed on Earth, Mickey's fate is to be the ship's one-man suicide squad. He is consigned to an ever-worsening series of grisly deaths, only to be resurrected with his memories intact with the use of an organic 3D printer capable of printing perfect, living copies of human beings. Subjected to lethal doses of radiation poisoning, occasional dismemberment, nerve-gas, and organ-failure from internal bleeding while infected with a hideous strain of space-borne Ebola, he ‘dies’ repeatedly. The hapless, mild-mannered Mickey manages to find some solace in the arms of sexually voracious security chief Nasha (Naomi Ackie). After seventeen serial resurrections, however, Mickey unexpectedly survives an accident in which he is declared deceased, and finds himself face-to-face with himself, or rather the prematurely printed Mickey 18. Since multiple incarnations of the same individual are punishable by the permanent death of all copies, Mickey's life (lives?) suddenly becomes infinitely more complicated.
In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the premise of Mickey 17 could easily descend into a tasteless farce. But Bong follows Pattinson's downtrodden Mickey with a genuine, heartfelt empathy which gives the character a depth he would otherwise lack. This is easily a career-best performance from Pattinson, the role giving him the opportunity to show a range he seldom gets to display. With Bong, he is able to play two versions of the same character: one with a ‘kick me’ sign on his back, and the other bordering on sociopathic. The film's other standout performances come from Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette. Ruffalo is clearly channeling the spirit of a certain controversial world leader with his grotesque, preening, narcissistic despot Marshall. Colette is equally unsubtle in her portrayal of Marshall's wife as a selfish, shallow, morally-dead harpy.
Mickey 17's pitch-black comedy brings to mind Terry Gilliam at his best. The film feels (in a good way) a little like Brazil in space, with hints of Armando Ianucci's Avenue 5 in its absurdist humor. Another film in which Bong Joon Ho champions the ‘little guy’ (and does so with a grim smile), this is a well made and timely satire for those with the stomach for its brutal laughs.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities, Damian is a former freelancer who previously wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.
