Salt is a movie that speaks to the power of pacing. At the utterly breakneck speeds that Salt travels at, there is no opportunity to let sink in exactly how dumb this movie really is. Director Phillip Noyce (a veteran of the only slightly less absurd Jack Ryan movies from the 1990s), working from a script by Kurt Wimmer (who made dumb pretty effective in Equilibrium, less so in Ultraviolet), puts this movie on a track to a speedy finish, and throws in as many explosions, elaborate car wrecks, ludicrous assassination attempts and death-defying stunts for mega-star Angelina Jolie as its brief run time will allow, all in order to prevent you from ever stopping to use your brain for a single second; because if you did, you'd go boss-eyed from the sheer stupidity of it all.
That Salt is fairly effective at being stupid is a relative blessing amid a summer mostly cursed by the wrong kind of dumb coming to theaters. It's no revelation, mind you, but it is a solid, brainless way to spend 90 minutes of your life in a dark, air-conditioned movie theater.
Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a character who was once named Edwin Salt and offered to Tom Cruise (he reportedly turned it down due to similarities to his Ethan Hunt character in the M:I series), and frankly, I think is better served with this change of genders. Jolie, always a fierce presence on screen, makes Salt engaging to watch, whether she's sharing a quiet, loving moment with her arachnologist husband or flipping her narrow ass from moving truck to moving truck along a busy Washington D.C. highway.
Salt's adventures in vehicular parkour stem from trouble at her once quiet, workaday job at the CIA. A Russian defector saunters into her office one day, and her boss ( Liev Schreiber, delightfully salty in his own right) sends her in to get the goods. The defector throws out a real gobsmacker of a story, telling of a secret 1970s Cold War project to insert Russian-trained children into American society, until a “Day X” arrives, and those sleeper agents go assassination-crazy in the hopes of starting a war and bringing catastrophe to America. It seems like easily dismissible poppycock, until the defector name-drops a specific spy: Evelyn Salt.
Of course, she can't be a real Russian spy, she's the protagonist of the film! But wait, why does she run? She claims she has to find her husband before the Russians do, but the fervor with which she makes her combustion-heavy escape seems to suggest larger motives. I can sit here and try to avoid specific spoilers about where the plot twists toward, but in the end it's kind of irrelevant. As a spy thriller, Salt is less full of holes and more one gigantic, craterous hole from which logic, reason, and plausibility cannot escape.
That said, I had a decent bit of fun watching Jolie and the rest of the cast (which, along with Schrieber, also includes the excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor as an agent out to arrest Salt) play these absurd scenarios with a lot of knowing straightness. Noyce sets up a number of excellent set-piece action sequences, including a particularly clever assassination attempt of the Russian president at a church funeral, which features Jolie blowing up pipe organs as some kind of thunderous signal of impending doom. And then there's that whole car-leaping thing, not even the best of the film's vehicular based sequences. All I'll say about the best one is that it makes particularly creative use of tasers.
By the time this all wraps up to a fairly predictable and meager conclusion, there's a good chance you'll have forgotten just about everything you watched that didn't involve someone shooting someone else, blowing something up, or defying physics for the sake of a killer looking jump. I'm just amazed a movie so rooted in ancient Cold War tropes as this one managed to keep my attention at all. Then again, it's not those tropes or, really, anything about the plot that will hook you. It's the action, and the star at the center of it, that makes Salt an endeavor worth sitting through. Allow this one cudgel your mind into submission, and you may just enjoy yourself.
That Salt is fairly effective at being stupid is a relative blessing amid a summer mostly cursed by the wrong kind of dumb coming to theaters. It's no revelation, mind you, but it is a solid, brainless way to spend 90 minutes of your life in a dark, air-conditioned movie theater.
Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a character who was once named Edwin Salt and offered to Tom Cruise (he reportedly turned it down due to similarities to his Ethan Hunt character in the M:I series), and frankly, I think is better served with this change of genders. Jolie, always a fierce presence on screen, makes Salt engaging to watch, whether she's sharing a quiet, loving moment with her arachnologist husband or flipping her narrow ass from moving truck to moving truck along a busy Washington D.C. highway.
Of course, she can't be a real Russian spy, she's the protagonist of the film! But wait, why does she run? She claims she has to find her husband before the Russians do, but the fervor with which she makes her combustion-heavy escape seems to suggest larger motives. I can sit here and try to avoid specific spoilers about where the plot twists toward, but in the end it's kind of irrelevant. As a spy thriller, Salt is less full of holes and more one gigantic, craterous hole from which logic, reason, and plausibility cannot escape.
By the time this all wraps up to a fairly predictable and meager conclusion, there's a good chance you'll have forgotten just about everything you watched that didn't involve someone shooting someone else, blowing something up, or defying physics for the sake of a killer looking jump. I'm just amazed a movie so rooted in ancient Cold War tropes as this one managed to keep my attention at all. Then again, it's not those tropes or, really, anything about the plot that will hook you. It's the action, and the star at the center of it, that makes Salt an endeavor worth sitting through. Allow this one cudgel your mind into submission, and you may just enjoy yourself.
