Salt (2010)

Who is Salt? For starters, she’s not Tom Cruise. Originally scripted as a vehicle for the man with the grin, the spy thriller Salt has been re-written for the woman with the lips, Angelina Jolie. Gender-wise, the conversion is seamless. Still, there’s something missing from this long-awaited big-budget actioner.

The film starts with that famous pucker all bloodied and bruised. A blonde Evelyn Salt has been captured in North Korea and is thrown on the floor of a torture cell in her little white bra and panties (much to XY chromosome audience delight). She suffers for what is presumably months, insisting that she is not a spy. When she is released, thanks to campaigning from her sweet, German arachnologist hubby (August Diehl), she is picked up by her CIA supervisor Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber). It’s your first clue that the woman can lie.

Fast-forward two years. A man claiming to be a Russian defector name Wassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) saunters into the CIA facility where Salt works and announces that he was responsible for the training of Russian child spies during the height of the Cold War. Dozens of them are now living as sleeper operatives in the United States, waiting for the designated day to strike. One of them is Evelyn Salt, whose mission is to kill the Russian president, thus reigniting the arms race between the East and West.

Winter doesn’t want to believe the Russian, but, when an intelligence agency higher-up named Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) holds Salt for questioning, she starts acting as guilty as sin. She covers the security camera with her lacy black panties, escapes her holding cell, dyes her hair villainous black, dons a leather moto jacket, and heads to New York–the purported site of the assassination.

Relentless is the best word to describe what ensues in director Phillip Noyce’s over-the-top spy thriller. On the one hand, I’m inclined to kiss the man’s feet for bucking the bloated 2.5-hour action flick trend and keeping Salt to a fast-paced, economic 99-minute run time. On the other hand, I was too busy stretching my suspension of disbelief to reach his feet.

I know that she’s a Russian assassin wrapped up in Langley superspy training, but Salt is able to do things that Ethan Hunt, James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Jack Ryan (the other CIA operative on Noyce’s resume) could only pull off in video games. In one scene, she slides down an elevator shaft–no grappling hooks or any other special equipment required–and sticks the landing like a Bela Karolyi-trained gymnast. In another, she walks away from a police-cruiser car crash without arousing notice, in spite of the crowd of curious New Yorkers surrounding the scene.

Noyce is adept at giving us all the elements of a good action film–from expository flashback scenes and slow-motion machine-gun hail right down to James Newton Howard’s heart-pumping, ear-splitting string and brass score–but ignoring one’s inner BS-meter grows too tedious to make any of these truly enjoyable. Kurt Wimmer’s script has so many crosses and double-crosses, it actually starts to be predictable. I saw the third-act whammy coming from a mile away. But then, Wimmer is the same guy who penned last summer’s waste of celluloid Law Abiding Citizen.

Salt relies heavily on Jolie’s box office bankability, as the Bond, Bourne, Ryan, and Hunt movies did on their respective stars. In that regard, the film delivers. No matter what ridiculous thing she’s doing or what outlandish disguise she dons, you simply cannot take your eyes off Jolie. Her portrayal is as steely and aloof as any of those guys and more nuanced and vulnerable by half. She may not be the best actress working in Hollywood, but she’s certainly a star.

The problem with that is the filmmakers just can’t resist the urge to turn her talented and already underrated co-stars Schreiber and Ejiofor into useless man props, all menacingly stern looks and bureaucratic sex appeal. But, with the gender re-assignment of the main character, I suppose turnabout is fair play.

So who is Salt? No one you’ll remember next summer.