Film reviews: Black Bag and Novocaine

Black Bag

Directed by Steven Soderbergh (R)

Steven Soderbergh’s second movie of this young year turns out to be “precisely the sort of adult, big-budget, star-driven affair that Hollywood has largely forsaken yet desperately needs,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett co-star as British intelligence agents whose marriage is tested when Fassbender’s George is given a week to find a mole in the team’s midst and learns that one of the suspects is the wife he adores.

Arriving less than two months after Soderbergh’s clever ghost story, Presence, this “sultry and sinister” film “feels like a cross between John le Carré and Agatha Christie.” For the Oscar-winning filmmaker, “it’s a doodle really,” but “also one of his smartest and sexiest films yet,” said Peter DeBruge in Variety. While the thriller stakes are high, because the rat inside the agency has stolen a technology capable of killing tens of thousands, the brilliance of the movie lies in how it uses the spy trade as a lens on the roles of secrecy and trust in any relationship.

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“Ultimately, it’s the marriage theme that gives Black Bag heft.” Its two stars cast distinctive spells, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. While Blanchett “strides through the movie with lioness grace,” Fassbender “makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.” The only downside of the flow the team has generated is that “Black Bag is over before you feel you’ve really gotten a hold of it.”

Novocaine

Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (R)

The new action comedy starring Jack Quaid “probably shouldn’t work as well as it does,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. Mixing ultraviolent sequences with a rom-com heart, it casts Quaid as Nathan Caine, an introvert with a rare disorder that renders him impervious to pain and cautious about every aspect of life. But after Nate falls for a coworker, played by Prey’s Amber Midthunder, and she’s kidnapped by violent bank robbers, he tries to rescue her while the film “uses Nate’s condition as an excuse to place him in remarkable, and remarkably gross, situations—like shoving his hand into boiling grease to grab a handgun.”

The film’s fight scenes, while often gory, are “as amusing as they are exciting,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. Even so, Novocaine “would probably have eventually worn out its welcome were it not for Quaid’s terrific performance.” The 32-year-old son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid proves “as endearing here as he was creepy in the recent Companion,” and his star power stretches a one-joke premise into 110 watchable minutes.

“While Quaid is uniquely skilled at playing both sides of Nate,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire, the actor can’t manage to create a cohesive character who’s both mild-mannered and “a wacked-out action hero.” The movie, too, struggles with tone, as the action “moves from cartoonishly fun to grim and queasy with nary a step in between.” Even Quaid’s likability proves problematic when things turn dark. After all, “we don’t want to see Nate actually tortured.”