Film reviews: Black Bag | Last Breath

For all the coolly staged set-pieces and stylish European locales, it’s the charged relationship between stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender that makes spy thriller Black Bag so alluring, writes Alistair Harkness

Black Bag (15) ★★★★☆

Last Breath (12A) ★★★☆☆

Marking Steven Soderbergh’s second feature in as many months, Black Bag finds the mercurial filmmaker indulging his rampant anglophilia with a contemporary British spy thriller that riffs on Len Deighton and John le Carré while subverting the wham-bam-thank-you-mam promiscuity of James Bond.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett take the leads as George Woodhouse and Kathryn St Jean, a married couple working for an MI5-like security agency whose devotion to each other is put to the test when Kathryn’s name pops up on a list of possible moles involved in a MacGuffin-filled plot to help a Russian dissident wreak nuclear havoc. George is the best interrogator in the agency, but when his informant is poisoned and Kathryn’s own top-secret work starts seeding doubts in his mind about her fidelity (the title is a catch-all code agents use when operational security requires them to keep their nearest and dearest in the dark), he turns his attention to the other colleagues named on his list of suspects to figure out if his wife is the unwitting victim of a set-up or if his trust in her is misplaced.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag | Claudette Barius/Focus Features

After a brief prologue, Soderbergh sets up this scenario in slick style with George and Kathryn hosting a plush dinner party at their enviable London townhouse for the other potential moles (they’re played by Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page and Bond alumnus Naomi Harris). George, it turns out, is quite the bon vivant and quite the gourmet; we see him preparing a rack of lamb, then warning Kathryn to avoid the chana masala because he’s slipped in a truth serum that will get his guests’ tongues wagging in entertainingly brutal ways (something exacerbated by the fact that they’re also comprised of two couples).

Soderbergh — working from a sharp script by regular collaborator David Koepp — has a lot of fun here serving up red herrings while his characters skewer each other with barbed comments (and worse), all the while indulging in the sort of work chat that would be banal if it didn’t involve boasting about heinous-sounding operations they’ve carried out under the auspices of protecting national security. He also has a lot of fun with George’s look, nodding to Harry Palmer with Fassbender’s Michael Caine-style specs and dressing him in turtlenecks, a spy fiction staple worn by everyone from David McCallum in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., to James Coburn in Our Man Flint, to Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig and Pierce Brosnan in the Bond films.

That Brosnan actually pops up in Black Bag as Kathryn’s silver-haired agency boss is yet another delightfully sly nod to the genre. Soderbergh, however, is not one to content himself with simply paying winking homage. Black Bag is also a sleek re-invention of a type of movie that’s been forced to compete with superheroes for so long it has mutated into something else (see Bond and Mission: Impossible), or has grown so chilly and austere in its pursuit of grown-up audiences (see most of the recent le Carré adaptations) that glamour and sexiness have become dirty words.

Not so here. Soderbergh mixes coolly staged set-pieces, European locales and hi-tech surveillance ops with semi-plausible/semi-ridiculous spy-craft dialogue that his stacked cast have a blast devouring (Burke and Abela are especially entertaining), though it’s really the wryly observed domestic details of George and Kathryn’s charged relationship (and Fassbender and Blanchett’s performances) that make Black Bag so alluring and downright delectable.

Finn Cole in Last Breath | Courtesy of Focus Features

Based on the documentary of the same name, Last Breath fictionalises the story of Chris Lemons, a British saturation diver who got trapped at the bottom of the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeen with limited air supply while repairing a piece of pipeline. As a pre-credit title announces, Chris’s job is one of the most dangerous in the world, something that enables director Alex Parkinson (who co-directed the doc) to swiftly up the stakes as the relatively inexperienced Chris (played by Finn Cole) leaves his fiancée to their nearby house-build to work a multi-day maintenance shift 300 metres below the surface.

Manning the mission is Chris’ folksy diving mentor Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), a veteran in the field facing the prospect of enforced retirement, while joining Chris in the water is Dave Yuasa (Marvel star Simu Liu), an apparently legendary diver whose uber-competency is expressed in his taciturn nature and general hostility towards Chris.

Minimal character development established and dispensed with, Parkinson mostly eschews further dramatic embellishments as things start to go catastrophically wrong, trusting instead that the unfamiliarity and specificity of the world, along with his protagonist’s dwindling air supply (depicted with countdown-clock urgency), will be enough to create a sense of tension amid the murky depths. It works up to a point, although it probably works better if you haven’t seen the doc and don’t know the outcome.

Black Bag and Last Breath are in cinemas from 14 March