In Review: 'Black Bag,' 'The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie'

Black Bag
Dir. Steven Soderbergh
94 min.

In just the last few years alone, veteran screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh have collaborated on three movies: The COVID-era tech thriller Kimi, the ghost story Presence, and now the sleek spy games of Black Bag. Koepp may be the single most successful writer in modern Hollywood, with credits that include blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man. And it seems like Soderbergh, a clinician by nature, has been using Koepp’s particular set of skills as the foundation for re-examining and often streamlining genre fare, whether that means making a haunted house movie from the ghost’s perspective or telling a pandemic story through the eyes of agoraphobic paranoiac. 

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The events in Black Bag are essentially meaningless, in that they’re about the deceptions surrounding a MacGuffin and have no reference to any real-world politics or global intrigue. It is purely an exercise in craft, the product of two artists working together on a gorgeous, relentlessly pared-down bauble that really catches the light. And in that narrow purpose, the film is hugely entertaining, chilly around the heart but generous in its appreciation of star power and its witty, elegant turns of the plot. If you’re squinting, you might see some connections between Black Bag and the marital discord of Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, or a tonal throwback to his sexy, twisty Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight. But this is more like Soderbergh in the laboratory, experimenting in stripping the spy movie to its barest essentials. 

Soderbergh’s focus and discipline finds an onscreen avatar in George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a bespectacled London intelligence agent with a peerless reputation for sniffing out lies. His new assignment relates to the leak of a destructive piece of malware called Severus, which threatens to do all sorts of damage to some vaguely referenced global hotspot. (Again, none of this actually matters.) George is given a list of five potential moles in the agency, one of whom happens to be his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), but he’s so good at compartmentalizing his emotions that his personal stake in the matter doesn’t necessarily affect his process. At one tense dinner party at their home, George and Kathryn invite the four other suspects: Agents James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), junior agent Clarissa Dubs (Marisa Abela), and psychiatrist Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris). 

From there, it’s off to the races. The dinner party is the start of a parlor mystery that concludes brilliantly in the same spot, as George works his mind around the case like George Smiley meets Hercule Poirot. The title Black Bag refers to the secrecy that defines the profession and it’s George’s job to crack each bag open and peer inside, looking for the traitor among people who lie and obfuscate at the most advanced level possible. When a delightfully mirthless Fassbender fixes his mind on a task like putting his suspects through a polygraph, the film’s scalpel-work is so expert that the whys of it cease to become relevant. Koepp and Soderbergh are doing John Le Carré as if it were a Mission: Impossible movie, replacing the stakes of real-world spycraft with pure intellectual showmanship. It works like gangbusters. — Scott Tobias (4/5) 

Black Bag opens in theaters everywhere tonight.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
Dir. Pete Browngardt
91 min.

It’s not an easy time to be a Looney Tunes star. In some ways, it hasn’t been easy for a while. Though characters like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner are probably still as widely recognized as, say, Abraham Lincoln, they haven’t had a regular showcase for their talents in decades. Their golden age ended in the middle of the 20th century and the Saturday morning and cable reruns that helped create new generations of fans dried up a while ago. Even Space Jam belongs to another time. When the streaming service then known as HBO Max debuted in 2020, the characters’ fortunes seemed like they might be reversing. Subscribers had access to hundreds of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts. What’s more, the service debuted Looney Tunes Cartoons, a smart update on the original shorts that stayed true to the spirit of the old shorts while throwing in the occasional nod to 21st century culture and technology. There was even a new Space Jam movie on the horizon. Things were looking up!

Then they weren’t. Looney Tunes Cartoons enjoyed a healthy run, but the service now known as Max unceremoniously yanked much of the classic archive and canceled the already completed feature film Coyote vs. Acme, seemingly condemning it to the limbo of the never-to-be-seen alongside Batgirl. (HBO Max did air Space Jam: A New Legacy, though you might have forgotten that.) The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie might have met a similar fate. Scheduled to debut on HBO Max and Cartoon Network back in 2022, it instead fell into limbo and might have remained there had its distribution not been picked up by indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment.

A stench of failure tends to attach itself to long-unreleased films but that should lift with The Day the Earth Blew Up’s release. Directed by Pete Browngardt, the Cartoon Network vet who served as Looney Tunes Cartoons’ creative director, it ports that series’ sensibility into a feature-length science fiction parody starring Daffy Duck (voiced by Eric Bauza) and Porky Pig (also Bauza) as lifelong friends and Petunia Pig (Candi Milo) as the flavor scientist who helps them fight off an alien invasion. While Daffy and Porky face being thrown out of their condemned house, the duo takes a job at the Goodie Gum factory, which is ramping up production ahead of debuting a new flavor: Strongberry. But there’s something a little off about Strongberry, and it might have something to do with the recent arrival of a scheming alien invader (Peter MacNichol).

Crafting a strong narrative isn’t exactly the film’s primary concern, which proves to be both The Day the Earth Blew Up’s greatest strength and its most nagging weakness. Credited to eleven writers, the film scatters inspired moments throughout, including a fun setpiece inspired in part by Modern Times. It’s filled with fun bits, but The Day the Earth Blew Up’s feature length starts to become an issue after a while, even at just 91 minutes. There’s just not enough story here to fill the time. Still, it’s a visually appealing showcase for the endearing pig-and-duck combo. They’re still big. It’s the bottom-line-obsessed corporate entertainment structure that got small. —Keith Phipps

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie invades theaters tonight.