Steven Soderbergh rolled the dice and this time it came up spy thriller on a nat 20… so he added a bonus mystery whodunit to the mix. He just got done with his unconventional ghost movie and just decides to make a decidedly cerebral spy flick for adults… I guess he can just keep up a One For Me game as long as he works cheap, fast, and totally in control.

Six spies sit down for dinner, one of them is a traitor. What a logline for a movie. I kind of wished it stayed the same chit-chat, eye-piercing sit-down for the entire flick. But no, eventually the group scatters and we get a more conventional (if this were the ’70s) film about espionage where the characters and the audience both work out whodunit.

I wasn’t always engrossed in this film and I’ll honestly say it lost me on occasion… but I assume that was intentional. This isn’t the big spy thriller genre flick I normally like so in that I’m giving it a solid rating is much to the credit of the actors and screenwriter. It’s a smart, devious film with sharp wit… I’d let Cate Blanchette study me with a subtle smile all day every day.

It’s odd to say given the stakes of the story that its actually a pretty low-stakes film that almost seems like a tension-filled casual hang. None of that sentence makes sense but that’s how I felt about this very cost-saving film. It has one effects shot but is otherwise a group of people studying each other in secret conversations. In that the penultimate final act set piece is a sit down lie detector montage says a lot.

I liked this movie quite a bit. I wouldn’t say I love it but I admire it up to a higher rating than I was planning when I sat down to write this review. Maybe in the theater I was a little lower, but the sum of all its parts is better than its moments. Good flick.

Score: 85