Director: Philip Noyce
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Review: 3 stars (of five)
I would have been okay with Salt just sucking. The percentage of action films that are not stupid and crappy is pretty low, so you have to go to one prepared for disappointment. It’s like meeting a beautiful woman and asking for her phone number, or at least that she stop laughing, just stop laughing. There’s gonna be a high failure rate.
But instead of being straight-up lousy, Salt has a pretty damned good middle—fast, dark, intriguing and creatively daring—sandwiched between a weak beginning and a weak ending. Is it that goddamned hard to write an action movie? Because this thing was one partial rewrite from being really good, and that’s frustrating. As it is, we have a brisk 90-minute thriller that relies on tension, momentum and mystery to carry you through the weaker moments, and it works. Much like The Losers, you know you’re not watching a very good movie, but you’re watching an enjoyable one.
The film opens with a pre-credit sequence lifted straight from one of Pierce Brosnan’s Bond movies, then launches its main plot, which turns deep-cover CIA agent Angelina Jolie into a fugitive from her own government. The incident which triggers this is dramatic and surprising and forces her to MacGuyver/Die Hard/ninja her way out of a secure government facility and elude intense pursuit. In retrospect, the setup makes no sense. It hangs, like the entire plot of the film, on the necessary certainty that Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is utterly and totally unstoppable. The bad guys gain nothing from making a move on Jolie in this way, at this time and place—in fact, it risks Jolie’s immediate death or capture, which would derail the Bond-scale evil plan.
So basically it’s just an excuse for action to establish Jolie’s badass credentials. It’s great, twisty idea that the writer couldn’t make actually work, but was apparently too compelling to abandon.
The film closes with the confrontations and reversals and revelations we’ve been expecting as the Evil Plan nears its deadly fruition. You’ll like that or you won’t—these things are always over the top. But then, in the last few minutes, the story puts a side character through implausible mental gymnastics to position Jolie’s character for a sequel. Remember the end of The Dark Knight, when Batman decides to have the police blame him for, I forget, stuff for the sole reason of having to be as chummy with the cops as Adam West in the next installment? This ending is equally stupid, but accomplished in two minutes rather than twenty. So that’s a virtue, yet it undercuts the film enough to hurt the chances for a sequel.
But the middle—remember, I said the middle is good? Between Jolie’s initial run-and-hide and the deeply preposterous climax, the film settles into the ambiguous moral tone (and color palette) of the Jason Bourne movies, and it’s pretty compelling stuff. As we start to see how she moves through the shadows of her new fugitive existence, her character becomes more perplexing—and alarming—by the minute. 
The filmmakers let our big-dollar heroine go into dark places, and they don’t let us into her head, don’t reassure us that it’ll all be okay, don’t hold our hands at all. They seem to think their audience will be kinda smart. They must hang out at a different multiplex or something.
Another highlight is the handling of Jolie herself. She’s a massive icon of glamour and sexuality, and her character here is entirely unglamorous and unsexual. Do you remember how in Whiteout, the story of a capable cop who’s always wearing sweaters and parkas in Antarctica, the producers managed to give Kate Beckinsale a sexy shower scene in the first five minutes? None of that crap goes on here. Being a female spy on the run turns out not to involve going undercover in a strip club, or seducing the enemy, or distracting gunmen (and the audience) with your breasts. Five seasons of Alias lied to me! But yes, I am praising a movie for dressing a woman in sensible clothes. How sad a world is it when that is worth remarking on?
The cast is good, but Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor are not given enough to do—it’s really Jolie’s show, and she pulls off the character and the action well.
It makes sense that Evelyn Salt is a bit of a cypher, and the decision to keep a distance between her and the audience works, but still the film underutilizes the love relationship that’s essential to Jolie’s motivation. The movie tells us why that relationship is so pivotal and transformative, but we never feel it.
Just like Inception is a deeply flawed movie that you should see anyway if you like “big ideas” and “wild effects” and “hours of urgent exposition,” Salt is a flawed movie (but a full hour shorter!) you should see anyway if you like spy thrillers and don’t mind if they’re a weird mix of gritty and absurd, and if you like Angelina Jolie and don’t mind if she’s not half-naked.
(Confidential to Joss “The Avengers” Whedon: Pretty much everything Jolie portrays in this movie as a badass, unstoppable super-spy is what the Black Widow should’ve been like, instead of standing around in Iron Man 2 doing nothing. Take notes.)
