Movie Review: Salt

by KYW's Bill Wine

Popcorn with your Salt?

A breathless action thriller, Salt is peppered with vigorous, non-CGI stunts that allow Angelina Jolie to demonstrate that her female action heroine can kick butt with the big boys.

And she can.  As she's amply demonstrated in Wanted and Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the Lara Croft movies, Jolie can carry an action flick just like reps from that other gender.

If only director Philip Noyce could have ignored the temptation to out-comic-book the comic books by making her title character ludicrously resourceful and invulnerable.

Salt is a contemporary espionage drama in which Jolie stars as a rogue CIA operative, a spy accused of being a double agent who goes on the run and dons several different disguises as she attempts both to prove her innocence and to stop what might be an assassination attempt on the president.

In a role originally intended for Tom Cruise (who opted to do the somewhat similar Knight and Day), Jolie plays the title character, Evelyn A. Salt, a CIA agent we meet as she's being released from a North Korean prison, where she's been tortured to no avail.

She is allegedly outed when a defector accuses her of being a Russian sleeper spy.

August Diehl plays her German scientist husband, Liev Schreiber her CIA boss, and Chiwetel Ejiofor a skeptical counterintelligence officer.

Aussie director Noyce (Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, The Quiet American, The Bone Collector) works from a labyrinthian script by Kurt Wimmer that lives on the Preposterosa and has a kick of Cold War nostalgia but that argues that perhaps that war isn't quite as cold as it's made out to be.

The screenplay keeps us wondering about Salt's ultimate identity until very late in the game, even if the film is less guessing game than chase flick.

But the narrative is so action-oriented and stays so stubbornly and relentlessly on the surface, lining up one stunt-laden action set piece after another, that we never really get to know the focal character.

And the sky-high level of ambiguity, though intriguing in the early reels, eventually puts us off.  As for the climax, it borders on the idiotic.

Our implicit question at the outset, "Just who is Salt?," makes an unwelcome return appearance at film's end -- never a good sign for an audience seeking satisfaction.

This pulsating but shallow potboiler in search of a franchise has "female James Bond" and "Bourne to be wild" written all over it.  But it lacks the lean muscle of Bourne and the slick playfulness of Bond, offering instead way-over-the-top derring-do as its calling card.

So we'll spy on 2 stars out of 4 for Salt. Jolie's star turn certainly impresses, but take everything else here with a grain of salt.