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salt 2010 movie review

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Angelina Jolie gives it her all in the title role, and her seasoned performance is almost enough to save Salt from its predictable and ludicrous plot.

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Phillip Noyce

Angelina Jolie

Evelyn Salt

Liev Schreiber

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Daniel Olbrychski

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Now HERE's what I mean by an action movie

salt 2010 movie review

Angelina Jolie is "Salt."

"Salt" is a damn fine thriller. It does all the things I can't stand in bad movies, and does them in a good one. It's like a rebuke to all the lousy action movie directors who've been banging pots and pans together in our skulls. It winds your clock tight and the alarm doesn't go off for 100 minutes.

It's gloriously absurd. This movie has holes in it big enough to drive the whole movie through. The laws of physics seem to be suspended here the same way as in a Road Runner cartoon. Angelina Jolie runs full speed out into thin air and doesn't look down until she's in the helicopter at the end.

Jolie is one fine-looking woman. You don't need me to tell you that. It's why she gets the big bucks. The movies have celebrated her eyes, lips, profile, biceps, boobs, waist, butt, thighs. "Salt" pays tribute to her ankles. Anyone who can jump from the heights she does here, in the way she does it, may die from a lot of causes, but a sprained ankle won't be one of them.

You know parkour? Wikipedia defines it as "the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting one's movements to the environment." Jolie's character, Evelyn Salt, makes it look as though " Run Lola Run " was about walking. There's a scene when she descends eight stories in an elevator shaft by simply jumping across it to one wall support lower than the last. Each time she lands she says "oof," but that's about it.

You're not going to hear much about the plot here. Nothing I could tell you would be necessary for you to know, and everything could be fatal to your enjoyment. Let's just make it simple: She plays a woman determined to singlehandedly save the world from nuclear annihilation. Oh, it's not that the plot holds water or makes any sense, but it's a pleasure to be surprised here and there along the way, and it's not like the movie lingers over each twist and turn as if it's just pulled an elephant out of a hat.

No, each revelation is the occasion for another chase scene. Evelyn Salt escapes from, or breaks into, one inescapable and/or impenetrable stronghold after another. And she does it all by herself, and with her bare hands, plus a few guns, grenades and a home-made rocket launcher. You know how it's been said of Ginger Rogers that "she did everything Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels"? Evelyn does everything James Bond did, except backwards and barefoot in the snow.

At one point in the movie, Evelyn is chained to a concrete floor in a North Korean dungeon while a rubber hose is charmingly stuck into her mouth and gasoline is poured in. That's at the beginning of the film. I'm not going to tell you what she survives later. She plays a spy for the CIA — but now I'm giving away too many details. Important supporting roles are played by Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor .

The movie has been directed by Phillip Noyce , an Australian whose work ranges from Tom Clancy thrillers to the great and angry drama " Rabbit-Proof Fence ." Here he performs as a master craftsman, aided by the cinematography of Robert Elswit and the editing of Stuart Baird and John Gilroy. The movie has a great many chase scenes, and faithful readers will know that these, in general, have lost their novelty for me. But a good chase scene is a good chase scene. It demands some sense of spatial coherence, no matter how impossible; some continuity of movement, no matter how devised by stuntwork and effects, and genuine interest for the audience.

It's in that area that Angelina Jolie really delivers. She brings the conviction to her role that such a movie requires. She throws herself into it with animal energy. Somehow, improbably, she doesn't come off as a superhero (although her immunity suggests one), but as a brave and determined fighter. How does she look? She looks beautiful by default, and there's a scene in an office where she looks back over her shoulder to talk with Schreiber and you think, oh, my. But neither Jolie nor Noyce overplays her beauty, and she gets gritty and bloody and desperate, and we get involved.

Although "Salt" finds an ingenious way to overcome history and resurrect the Russians as movie villains, neither that nor any other elements of the plot demand analysis. It's all a hook to hang a thriller on. It's exhilarating to see a genre picture done really well.

salt 2010 movie review

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

salt 2010 movie review

  • Daniel Olbrychski as Orlov
  • Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt
  • Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peabody
  • Liev Schreiber as Ted Winter
  • Hunt Block as President Lewis
  • Andre Braugher as Defense secretary
  • Kurt Wimmer

Directed by

  • Phillip Noyce

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Angelina Jolie in Salt (2010)

A CIA agent goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy. A CIA agent goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy. A CIA agent goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy.

  • Phillip Noyce
  • Kurt Wimmer
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  • Liev Schreiber
  • Chiwetel Ejiofor
  • 649 User reviews
  • 338 Critic reviews
  • 65 Metascore
  • 4 wins & 16 nominations total

Salt: Trailer #2

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Angelina Jolie

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Liev Schreiber

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Daniel Pearce

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Andre Braugher

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Olek Krupa

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Cassidy Hinkle

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  • Trivia The movie was originally written with Salt as a male (Edwin A. Salt), and Tom Cruise was approached to play him. Ultimately, he backed out and the script was rewritten with a female lead and Angelina Jolie was cast.
  • Goofs In the Theatrical Release, the President is unconscious, not dead, in the bunker. Upon regaining consciousness, the President certainly would have revealed Agent Winter, and not Agent Salt, as the culprit.

Evelyn Salt : What is your name?

Vassily Orlov : My name is Vassily Orlov. Today, a Russian agent will travel to New York city to kill the President. This agent is KA-12.

Evelyn Salt : The KA program is a myth.

Vassily Orlov : Don't you want to know the name?

Evelyn Salt : You're good. You can tell the rest of your story to one of my colleagues.

Vassily Orlov : Salt.

Evelyn Salt : Yes?

Vassily Orlov : The name of the agent is Evelyn Salt.

Evelyn Salt : My name is Evelyn Salt.

Vassily Orlov : Then you are a Russian spy.

  • Alternate versions UK theatrical version was cut for violence to achieve a '12A' rating with edits to the opening torture scene and some blows and chain throttling during fight scenes. These cuts persisted into the US theatrical version, although the UK DVD was raised to a 15 due to the inclusion of the extended and director's cut versions (which are unrated on the US DVD).
  • Connections Featured in The Rotten Tomatoes Show: The Men Who Stare at Goats/A Christmas Carol/Precious (2009)
  • Soundtracks Zarya Traditional Arranged by Irina Mikhailova Performed by Irina Mikhailova and Hans Christian Courtesy of Well-Tempered Productions

User reviews 649

Decent flick.

  • Nov 25, 2010
  • How long is Salt? Powered by Alexa
  • It's been over ten years now, is there ever going to be a sequel or some sort of continuation of Salt's story in some form?
  • What is "Salt" about?
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  • July 23, 2010 (United States)
  • United States
  • Sony Pictures (United States)
  • Agente Salt
  • Albany, New York, USA
  • Columbia Pictures
  • Relativity Media
  • Di Bonaventura Pictures
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro
  • $110,000,000 (estimated)
  • $118,311,368
  • $36,011,243
  • Jul 25, 2010
  • $293,503,354
  • Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
  • Dolby Digital
  • Dolby Atmos

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Movie review: Jolie is worth her ‘Salt’

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“Salt” the film and Evelyn Salt the character are perpetually in motion and that’s a good thing for its own sake and because it keeps audiences from dwelling on how unapologetically preposterous the plot in question is.

And really, who goes to summer action movies for cast-iron logic anyway? Or for plausible characters, for that matter? You go for brisk stunts expertly executed, for well-directed action that doesn’t allow you to catch your breath and for one of the preeminent action stars of our time. Yes, that would be Angelina Jolie.

With what she does here on top of “Lara Craft: Tomb Raider,” “Wanted” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” Jolie has earned the right to be considered not a potent female action star but a potent action star period, end of story.

What makes her so good, and what is visible as she deftly navigates the unending silliness of “Salt,” are traits that add up to a fierce commitment to action, a determination to make the role of a CIA agent who literally and metaphorically takes no prisoners as convincing as she can.

For one thing, although aided by stunt double Eunice Huthart, Jolie is athletic and fearless enough to do many of her own stunts, including nervy scenes of jumping from moving truck to moving truck (albeit done with the aid of cables and harnesses that were removed in post-production).

The actress is also expert at projecting the ice cold fury that makes “Salt’s” fight scenes strong. Jolie’s don’t-mess-with-me fierceness is palpable, and it allows her to angrily throw herself into the martial arts action like she means every blow she strikes.

Her casting makes all the difference in a part that would be completely standard if a man played it. (One of the well-known ironies of Jolie’s success in “Salt” is that screenwriter Kurt Wimmer originally wrote the role for a man.). It is the contrast between what cultural conditioning in general and Hollywood movies in particular tell us about women’s roles and what Jolie can in fact accomplish that holds our interest here.

If “Salt” wouldn’t be as effective with someone else in the title role, it also benefits greatly from the professional direction of Phillip Noyce, who put Harrison Ford through his paces in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” Though he can’t do much about the film’s shaky foundation, Noyce sets a brisk, no nonsense pace and works with Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit and veteran editor Stuart Baird (“Casino Royale,” “The Legend of Zorro”) to insure that no one on or off the screen has much time for reflection.

Certainly not Evelyn Salt, introduced being tortured by some angry North Koreans who don’t buy her insistence that she isn’t a spy. But a secret agent, as she is soon telling her super-gentle arachnologist future husband Mike ( August Diehl), is just what she is, working at a CIA front organization in Washington, D.C., for spy boss and friend Ted Winter ( Liev Schreiber).

“Salt’s” action picks up, wouldn’t you just know it, on Evelyn and spider-loving Mike’s wedding anniversary. On her way out the door, she is called back to interrogate possible Russian defector Orlov (longtime Andrzej Wajda collaborator Daniel Olbrychski).

With Winter and counter-intelligence expert Peabody ( Chiwetel Ejiofor) looking on, Orlov tells quite a tale. He says he has spent years planting a cadre of crack Russian secret agents in the U.S. Unlike the recent real-life Russian operatives uncovered in the U.S., folks whose main accomplishment was apparently cashing their checks from Moscow, this is one deadly group intent on nothing less than completely destroying America.

More than that, Orlov says, one of his people is about to go to New York to assassinate the current Russian president, in town for a state funeral. That assassin, he announces dramatically, is none other than Evelyn Salt.

Now if there was ever a time when cooler heads should prevail, this would seem to be it, but just the opposite happens. In fact all of “Salt” is based on the notion that nothing reasonable or plausible ever happens. So when a worried Evelyn decides she has to check up on her husband and then go to New York to check out that funeral, she is forced to outsmart and outrun a building full of CIA types. Counter-intelligence’s Peabody can scream “box her in” all he wants, but you might as well try to catch the wind.

Though Schreiber, Ejiofor and Olbrychski do as well as the script allows them to, human relationships, especially those between Evelyn and her husband, are the film’s weakest link. On the other hand, there are compensations: “Give her a gun or a grenade,” veteran stunt coordinator Simon Crane says of his star, “and there’s no one better.”

“Salt” is set up, as most films seem to be these days, with a sequel in mind, and that might be fun, especially since “Salt II” would become the first Hollywood blockbuster to be named after a real-life nuclear arms reduction treaty. Now that would be something to look forward to.

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Salt: film review.

Angelina Jolie, for all intents and purposes, is James Bond in her new film "Salt," and it's really no surprise that Jolie, the only female action star in Hollywood, more than measures up to Daniel Craig.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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She never quite says: “The name is Salt . Evelyn Salt.” But Angelina Jolie , for all intents and purposes, is James Bond in her new film “Salt,” and it’s really no surprise that Jolie, the only female action star in Hollywood, more than measures up to Daniel Craig.

Donning several guises while on the run in Columbia’s spy thriller, she even — with the help of considerable facial latex, mind you — turns up as a guy in one scene. She makes a pretty ugly one, but it makes an amusing gag, a kind of acknowledgment that kick-ass action heroes now come in both genders. In Jolie’s case, it’s more convincing than ever because in those Lara Croft movies, she looked like an animated creature that popped out of a video game.

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While preposterous at every turn, “Salt” is a better Bond movie than most recent Bond movies, as its makers keep the stunts real and severely limit CGI gimmickry. This is a slick, light summer entertainment that should throw considerable coin into Sony’s coffers while re-establishing (if it needs re-establishing) Jolie’s bona fides as an action star. The film certainly didn’t need the assist, but recent news events have erased any objection from critics, tied to laws of plausibility, over the film’s key concept that Russian sleeper spies still exist in the U.S. long after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Another talking point here is the similarity between this film, reportedly first developed for Tom Cruise, and the action-spy thriller he chose to do, the lamentable “Knight and Day.” There are astonishing similarities: An American spy believed to be a rogue agent gets chased by the CIA, with the protagonist escaping by, among other tricks, leaping from one fast-moving vehicle to another on a major thoroughfare. These similarities only point up how smart “Salt” is in crafting its escapist fare.

Director Phillip Noyce and stunt guru Simon Crane, working from a clever though shallow screenplay by Kurt Wimmer, make sure the stunts in “Salt” look like a dangerous and demanding day at the office. In “Knight and Day,” the movie’s absurd physicality is played as effortless clowning replete with repartee that is supposed to remind you of 007 but in fact is embarrassingly flat and banal.

There’s no joking around here. Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is made of sterner stuff, the kind that can survive a North Korean prison without giving up the name of her employer, the CIA. Back in D.C. and married to a nice though naive German arachnologist (August Diehl) — yes, he studies spiders and, yes, there is a payoff to that — she is assigned to CIA desk duties when a supposed Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) walks in one day.

Nobody is particularly buying his act, especially Salt’s superior, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), but she accedes to his plea to interrogate the man briefly before she heads home to an anniversary dinner. The Russian talks nonsense about sleeper cells and a plot to assassinate the Russian president on American soil. Then he happens to drop the name of the Russian sleeper spy: Evelyn Salt.

This apparently is enough to turn the Agency’s counterintelligence officer, Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), into her instant foe. Nothing that happens after this deserves any serious scrutiny, but it’s fun to watch Jolie’s Salt seemingly transforms into the Russian sleeper agent she is reputed to be — escaping from a virtual lockdown, dodging cars and bullets, making her way to New York and through subway tunnels to confront the Russian president, then take on, seemingly, every Russian and CIA op in her way.

All those “seemingly” qualifiers are meant to indicate that no studio is going to cast Jolie as a villain or even an anti-hero. What do you think this is, the ’70s? But there’s just enough doubt for the ad copy to read: Who is Salt?

You can’t say the movie keeps you guessing about this for long since most attentive viewers will figure out the true villain(s) well before the climax. But the chase is the whole point.

Here Noyce and his team excel. Propelled by James Newton Howard’s nerve-teasing music and enhanced by Robert Elswit’s clear-eyed, smartly positioned cameras, “Salt” moves ever forward — pushing, pushing, pushing its heroine to greater feats every minute. It doesn’t stop for martinis, either shaken or stirred, or any other detours. The movie is lean and muscular, looking for action even in situations where a little sleight of hand might have done the trick.

You do wish that maybe it did slow down to consider the human factor. Salt is married; let’s dig into that. A marriage between an agent and a civilian is never explored. In making the husband a problem that needs solving, here — not to give anything away — the movie stumbles badly. At the end of the day, “who is Salt” is less a tagline than a criticism. Eventually, you know what Salt is. But who she is isn’t satisfactorily resolved.

In story terms, that is. In Hollywood terms, there’s never any doubt: Salt is Angelina Jolie.  

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Movie Review | 'Salt'

Spies, Spider Venom and Sex Appeal

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salt 2010 movie review

By A.O. Scott

  • July 22, 2010

“Who is Salt?” is the question posed, for the past month or so, on the side of just about every bus in the land. To the extent that “Salt” is a mystery, the question is apt enough. Is she — played at high velocity and with steely ferocity by Angelina Jolie — a Russian mole, a C.I.A. superassassin or a little of both? But to the much greater extent that “Salt,” directed by Phillip Noyce from a screenplay by Kurt Wimmer, is an action movie, the more salient question might be: What does Salt do?

You name it. On the run from suspicious colleagues in the C.I.A. after she has been slandered or had her deep cover blown by a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski), Salt sheds her shoes and then her underwear (so as to blind a security camera and spike the blood pressure of at least half the audience) and proceeds to assemble a rocket launcher out of office furniture and cleaning supplies. That’s just an overture, really, to a symphony of hurtling, fairly ingenious fights and escapes. Salt leaps from the roofs of moving trucks on her way out of Washington and then — once in New York — enacts vengeance, pre-emptive mayhem and self-defensive killing using spider venom, plastic explosives and stolen clothes.

It all happens in such a frenzy of momentum and on-the-fly exposition that some of the more preposterous elements in the story will strike you only in retrospect, after the helicopter leaps, the elevator-shaft daredevilry and the race-the-clock flirtation with thermonuclear war. But that is as it should be. Mr. Wimmer has constructed a puzzle just complicated enough to keep you alert while Mr. Noyce, a protean Australian craftsman whose other credits include “Patriot Games” and “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” throws the pieces in the air and watches them collide, explode and crash to the ground.

Evelyn Salt — a name usually reduced, because everyone is in such a hurry, to its first or final syllable — is seen, before the opening titles, being tortured in a North Korean prison, from which she is sprung by a co-worker (Liev Schreiber) and the German arachnologist (August Diehl) who will become her husband. Two years later, on their wedding anniversary, Salt leaves the apartment they share with a cute dog and some poisonous spiders, and makes her way to the corporate offices that serve as a front for her C.I.A. job. There she meets the Russian defector, who insists that Salt is really named Chernkov, that her father was a wrestler and her mother a chess prodigy, and that Salt was taken away by the K.G.B. to be trained from infancy as an undercover agent.

She and her classmates were schooled in “idioms, idiosyncrasy and ideology” (a much better slogan than “Who is Salt,” by the way, though perhaps for a different movie) so they could infiltrate American society. Now, two decades after the end of the cold war, they are being activated to cause some big global trouble.

Does Salt travel to New York to foment this trouble or to head it off? Since Ms. Jolie is someone you are inclined to root for, and since she throws out a few damsel-in-distress bids for empathy amid all the smackdowns and chases, it’s hard not to think of her as one of the good guys. But a lot of circumstantial evidence, like flashbacks to her childhood at the Soviet superspy Hogwarts, suggests otherwise. The movie does what it can to scramble the moral signals, but the plot twists are telegraphed even as they are camouflaged, by the casting, as well as by the writing. Mr. Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, squabbling as two C.I.A. officers chasing Salt, are skilled at suggesting potential ambiguities about their characters without distracting attention from the star.

Which is scarcely possible, in any case. Perhaps the most ridiculous scene in “Salt” has Ms. Jolie walking away unnoticed from the aftermath of a multi-vehicle smashup. I suspect this was meant as a joke, since her magnetism is the film’s foundation and reason for being (even though her role was originally conceived as a vehicle for Tom Cruise). She is the prime special effect, and a reminder that even in an era of technological overkill, movie stars matter.

Spies Like Her?

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Not that “Salt” matters much. Despite an overlay of geopolitics, the movie is as loud and empty as James Newton Howard’s score , which I don’t mean entirely in a bad way. The music does what it needs to do to amplify and inflect the action, while also paying subtle sonic homage to the brassy Bond-style soundtracks of the past. And the film itself moves with speed and efficiency. Ms. Jolie’s contribution is to endow the silliness with a gravity and clarity of purpose that makes you care, for a scant hour and a half, who Salt is, what she does and where she stands. Not that she stands for much, or stays still for very long.

“Salt” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Fisticuffs and gunplay, accompanied by swearing.

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Phillip Noyce; written by Kurt Wimmer; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Stuart Baird and John Gilroy; music by James Newton Howard; production designer, Scott Chambliss; costumes by Sarah Edwards; produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Sunil Perkash; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.

WITH: Angelina Jolie (Evelyn Salt), Liev Schreiber (Ted Winter), Chiwetel Ejiofor (William Peabody), Daniel Olbrychski (Orlov), Andre Braugher (Secretary of Defense) and August Diehl (Mike Krause).

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Salt Review

Salt

20 Aug 2010

NB: A mid-movie spoiler revealed in the following review. Do not read on if you don’t want to know anymore.

How Angelina Jolie and Phillip Noyce must have smiled inwardly and breathed a massive sigh of relief when the FBI finally managed to do something right and round up that group of, frankly, inept Russian sleeper spies back at the end of June. Because, until then, the concept of Salt — the thriller which reunites the director/star pairing some ten years after they first teamed up for The Bone Collector — seemed like a distant dream, a preposterous fantasy world, the sort of off-the-top-of-a-screenwriter’s head nonsense that makes your dad shake his head on a Sunday afternoon viewing and mutter darkly, “That’s far-fetched.” After all, it revolves around the idea of Russian sleeper spies, buried deep within the upper echelons of American government, ready to shed their cover at a moment’s notice and strike at the heart of the Great Satan.

Now, thanks to Anna Chapman and her Commie cronies, Salt doesn’t seem so far-fetched, after all. Having said that, if Chapman and her pals are ever allowed to clap eyes on the movie, they’ll recognise virtually nothing about their mundane lives. Not for Jolie’s Evelyn Salt the day-to-day drudgery of form-filling, light bureaucracy and keeping up appearances. Instead, this is the sort of post-Bourne spy who considers it all in a day’s work to bounce off bridges onto moving trucks, casually wipe out a squadron of trained assassins, and change her appearance more often than presenters on The One Show switch channels. Or, perhaps, that should be allegiance.

For — and here comes that promised spoiler — in just the first hint that the sands of Salt are going to shift more often than your average blockbuster, it’s soon revealed that Salt may, after all, be a Russkie plant, the sort you can’t pull up without causing serious damage. From this moment on, the film lurches enjoyably into the unknown, as we’re invited to consider the prospect of Angelina Jolie, not as a heroine, but as a villain. Or, truth be told, something inbetween, as Noyce, that old stager, revels in keeping the audience guessing on Salt’s motivations and actions, even when she appears to be up to her gorgeous neck not so much in derring do as derring shouldn’t.

All of which wouldn’t be possible without Jolie. After all, this is a film that revolves almost entirely around her, with her valiant supporting actors — Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the CIA agents dedicated to cutting her down — for the most part reduced to standing around and admiring her incredible, crazy, death-defying antics. And when it comes to selling incredible, crazy, death-defying antics, Jolie has few peers in the action business. And we’re including the guys in that. Whether it’s been the disappointing Tomb Raider series, or abseiling down a skyscraper in a corset in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, or flipping a car over a bus in Wanted, Jolie has been a dominating, vital presence in action movies for almost a decade.

And that continues here, with her on impressively steely form as Salt, convincing completely with action sequences in which she escapes from a moving cop car by using a taser in a manner that would surely invalidate the warranty, or manages to get down a lift shaft without actually waiting for the lift to arrive. Particularly in the movie’s second half, when Salt barely utters a word, it’s a performance that rests entirely on Jolie’s natural presence and physicality. It’s at times like this that Jolie brings a freshness to the character and the action that the tried and tested Tom Cruise — who was attached to Kurt Wimmer’s much sought-after screenplay back when she was a he, ultimately rejecting it because of similarities to his Mission: Impossible character, Ethan Hunt — might not. If Anna Chapman had done anything like this, chances are she’d have lasted about five minutes.

But it’s not just a part that trades on movie-star charisma, gym-honed elasticity and the kind of glaring stare that could make men twice her size think twice about having a go. Salt requires Jolie to act, initially as the demure, blonde-haired office jockey we first meet. Then, as the plot thickens, Jolie does a nice line in panic as Salt fears for the safety of her arachnologist husband (August Diehl, with a floppy-fringed makeover designed to eradicate any memories of his Inglourious Basterds SS officer), who goes conveniently missing at the same time as Salt is, potentially, activated.

It’s a shame, then, that the movie Noyce constructs around her isn’t quite as rewarding. His track record with CIA movies has been impeccable, with The Quiet American following on from the Jack Ryan double-bill of Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger, but those films were all, by and large, grounded in the real world, with fairly plausible plot twists. And, despite the real-world intrusion which might give licence to the premise, the film itself is so littered with implausible plot twists, stunts and characters acting out of character that it’s all become a little daft even before we’re expected to buy into a sequence in which Jolie tries to pass herself off as a bloke. That the tone throughout remains deadly serious doesn’t help.

Noyce, directing large-scale action for the first time since Val Kilmer’s outing as The Saint, handles the more outlandish set-pieces, but is burdened by a need to humanise his heroine; a need that manifests itself in an unfortunate over-reliance on unintentionally hilarious flashbacks which show Salt, disguised as an improbably hot spider enthusiast, clumsily falling in love with Diehl, thus giving her a potential Get Out Of Jail Free card. And, admirable and brave though some of Noyce’s story choices are, it’s a lot easier to root for an adorable blonde who we think has been framed, than wrestle with our consciences while a cold-blooded, gun-toting brunette commits, or seems to commit, crimes against the state. For a while, Salt doesn’t have a protagonist it’s easy to get on side with. The consequence being there’s a black hole at the middle of the picture.

Happily, light manages to escape this particular black hole in the form of a third act revolving around a good, old-fashioned tussle between virtue and evil as loyalties waver and secrets are revealed. (Secrets that might not necessarily shock anyone who’s been paying a blind bit of notice, but secrets nonetheless.)

But, gaping flaws and all, at just 95 minutes Salt fairly races along (we suspect that there’s a whole DVD’s-worth of deleted material kicking around on a Culver City cutting-room floor), and while Noyce and Jolie bat breathlessly from explosion to car chase to shoot-out, there’s just about enough fun here to make a second helping of Salt a relatively palatable prospect.

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COMMENTS

  1. Salt - Rotten Tomatoes

    When Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) became a CIA officer, she swore an oath to duty, honor and country. But, when a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy, Salt's oath is...

  2. Now HERE's what I mean by an action movie - Roger Ebert

    Evelyn Salt escapes from, or breaks into, one inescapable and/or impenetrable stronghold after another. And she does it all by herself, and with her bare hands, plus a few guns, grenades and a home-made rocket launcher.

  3. Salt (2010 film) - Wikipedia

    Salt is a 2010 American action thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce, written by Kurt Wimmer, and starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Daniel Olbrychski, August Diehl and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn Salt, who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent and goes on the run to try to clear her name.

  4. Salt (2010) - User reviews - IMDb

    This film focuses on Evelyn Salt (played by Angelina Jolie), a CIA operative who is a living a peaceful life with her German boyfriend Michael Krause (played by August Diehl) and being held as one of the most respectable agents at her job.

  5. Salt (2010) - IMDb

    Salt: Directed by Phillip Noyce. With Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski. A CIA agent goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy.

  6. Movie review: Jolie is worth her ‘Salt’ - Los Angeles Times

    What makes her so good, and what is visible as she deftly navigates the unending silliness of “Salt,” are traits that add up to a fierce commitment to action, a determination to make the role ...

  7. Salt: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter

    Angelina Jolie, for all intents and purposes, is James Bond in her new film "Salt," and it's really no surprise that Jolie, the only female action star in Hollywood, more than measures up to...

  8. Spies, Spider Venom and Sex Appeal (Published 2010)

    Salt leaps from the roofs of moving trucks on her way out of Washington and then — once in New York — enacts vengeance, pre-emptive mayhem and self-defensive killing using spider venom, plastic...

  9. Salt Reviews - Metacritic

    As a CIA officer, Evelyn Salt swore an oath to duty, honor and country. Her loyalty will be tested when a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy. Salt goes on the run, using all her skills and years of experience as a covert operative to elude capture.

  10. Salt Review | Movie - Empire

    CIA agent Evelyn Salt (Jolie) goes on the run when a Russian defector accuses her of being a Soviet sleeper agent, with a deadly agenda: kill the Russian president and trigger World War III. As...