A fun mash-up of spy film styles. The understated, rigidness of Le Carre combined with the jazzy smoothness of Bond, Black Bag is entertaining enough and breezes along but I’m afraid this wasn’t a total success for me. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s impeccable as you’d expect from a film shot by Peter Andrews (I know). But narratively, it was all over the place. The stakes of the story are Hollywood-enormous ‐ literal nuclear meltdown ‐ but the protagonist’s main concern are some very British dinner parties. In video games, they call this ludonarrative dissonance and it’s confusing as hell.

All the same, I’m glad someone gave this a go but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again..