Ben O'Shea - Black Bag:This Movie Is A Licence To Have A Dinner Party

Ben O'Shea was in studio with Clairsy & Lisa to review the new spy thriller Black Bag which stars Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender & Pierce Brosnan. Did he like it? His score out of five stars is here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Great the flick with Benow. Then I do love a
good spy thriller as long as it is thrilling. Well,
this is an interesting movie, black Bag. And so if
I were to tell you that this is a spy thriller,
I think a lot of people listening today will be thinking,
you know, car chases, explosions, gun shots to James Bond.

(00:23):
Now that show that was just so this is this
is more of a Tinker Taylor Soldier spy talky talky
spy thriller where instead of instead of shootouts and double
seven and his license to kill this movie is a
license to have a dinner party. Like literally, the biggest
action in this movie does happen around a dining table,

(00:44):
and there is I can confirm there is only one
gun shot in the entire movie. Also, you won't miss it.
And that's all I'm going to say now. So, and
the reason and the reason this is a little bit
different is it comes from director Steven Soderberger kind of
burst onto the scene with sex, livees and videotape back
in the nineties and then has crafted this really interesting

(01:05):
career where he's done things like Contagion, which turned out
to be prophetic to movies like Magic, Mike Ocean's eleven
Logan Lucky, lots of different types of movies. Some of
them were great, some of them were okay, some of
them not so good. But he certainly has his own
distinctive style, bringing sort of indie filmmaking to the mainstream.
And so to tell this spy thriller, he's assembled like

(01:27):
the most incredible cast of British actors. You've got Kate
Blanchette and Michael Fassbender who played married spies working for
this UK intelligence agency. Kate Blanchette's no, it's like miss
Smith Smith thinking, thinking person, thinking person's mister and missus Smith.

(01:47):
That's a good way to look at this movie. And
so Catherine is sort of a field agent. She's you know,
she's the super spy, very accomplished. And her husband, George,
he's sort of a human lie detector. He's the guy
who's behind the scenes, sort of in charge of interrogations
and stuff like that. Through marriage to that, yeah, well
they're a rising pair. But they but the one thing
that's clear from the start is they will do anything

(02:08):
for each other. Like she says to him, just point blank,
would you kill for me, George, and he says yet
without question. So that's the sort of relationship they have.
But it gets tested when George is assigned with finding
a mole in the organization. Someone in their close circle
is a traitor who's potentially selling the secrets of this
black bat of this Well, black bag means kind of

(02:30):
like things that are things that have kept secret, like
a secret operator. It's in the black bag, and you
can't talk about it to anybody, even your wife, you can't.
If it's in the black bag, you can't talk about it.
And so, so his operation is in the black bag
to find this, to find this mole, and the at
risk is this cyber hacking super device, doomsday device called Severus, which,
to be honest, is the worst part of the film.

(02:51):
It's a mcguffin to end all mcguffins. But just put
that to one side. Forget I ever said it, Okay,
and so and so George has got to find this mole,
and he he thinks the best way to do this, well,
you can put them on an actual light detector, you
could surveil them, you could do all of those things. No,
but why would you invite them all over for a
dinner party. So he gets the key suspects to their
house with him and Kate Blanchette sit them around the

(03:13):
dinner table and they have, you know, some high stakes
conversation over a curry. He makes them a masala and
the way they go. But you look at the actors
around this table, right, So you've got reggae Jean Page
from Bridgeton, the Duke of Hastings Amazing, could be a
future James Bond, justly, Naomi Harris money Penny from the
Daniel Craig James Bond movies. You've got Tom Burke who

(03:35):
was in Furiosa, and Marissa Abella who played Amy Wineho
in Back to Black. So you've got all those, plus
Kate Blanchette and Michael Fassbender around a table and they're
sort of drinking wine. The wine might be laced with
truth serum that George has put in there. I don't
know if that's legal, but anyway, and so then as

(03:57):
they start to have a bit of the plank, they
starts billing secrets about failed operations. Also, you reveal there's
quite a few intra office relationships going on the HR
department at this UK officer have a nightmare and so
and then they kind of wait to see who will
reveal themselves as the Trader, and then you know, they

(04:17):
have this dinner party. It ends in you know, in
pretty acrimonious circumstances. They all go off. George monitors what
happens in the wake of this dinner party, and then
gets them all back together for another dinner party. It's
a two point zero very much to see for the
final kind of you know, it's almost like the Sherlock
Holmes well, you know, if you you know, you told
me this before, but now how do you explain this?

(04:39):
And then they do the big rule the Traders without
Alan company and so so there is not a lot
of you know, sort of like action in the way
we traditionally think about it in a spy movie. But
there's plenty of fireworks from a conversational point of view.
So there you go. How many how manys Berkans are

(04:59):
you giving? That? Well, it gets knocked down a bit
because of the mcguffin storyline, because it's so dumb and
it just makes it unnecessarily convoluted. And Pierce Brosnan is
sort of the boss of the of the intelligence and
he's the one who's he's the one in charge of
the mcguffin, and it's like, that's not so great, but
otherwise it's really really great adult cinema that we don't

(05:19):
really see anymore. I'm going to give this one three
and a half. Okay, all right, I'm in very good. Yeah.
Thanks note