Movie Review: Salt (2010)

Salt (2010)

Directed By:
Phillip Noyce

Starring:
Evelyn Salt: Angelina Jolie
Ted Winters: Liev Schreiber
Peabody: Chiwetel Ejiofor
Vassily Orlov: Daniel Olbrychski
Mike Krause: August Diehl

Rating:

Far Fucking Out

Salt is a complete anachronism; a bug, loud, dumb 80s spy thriller with Russians as the villains and nuclear Armageddon at stake. Instead of James Bond or one of his overmuscled American counterparts matching wits and silenced pistols against a detonator-wielding superterrorist, we get Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who stands accused of being a Russian sleeper agent tasked with killing the Russian president. Once her cover is blown, Salt becomes an all-running, all-shooting adrenaline-fest, stopping for nothing; characters, plot, and I loved every minute of it.

Actually, "love" is probably too strong a word, but "like" doesn't really cover it either, but there's something about Salt that is incredibly appealing, almost magnetic. From the film's opening moments, when a Russian defector is led into an interrogation room to tell the C.I.A. a story about how, for 40 years, the Russians had trained and indoctrinated secret agents to infiltrate America from the suburbs to the government, it hearkens back to old-school U.S.A. vs. Russia spy thriller throwdowns. By leaving the Middle East and power mad American spymasters out, Salt has a chance to be a lot of fun without taking itself too seriously.

If you must know, the plot revolves around a woman, Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), who is accused by the Russian defector of being sent to the United States to kill the Russian president, who is in town to attend the funeral of the American vice president. There are two problems: First, Salt is the C.I.A. agent interrogating the defector, who appears to be telling the truth. Second, the minute the defector is out of the room, he murders two agents and Salt's husband goes missing.

The movie tries very hard to get the audience guessing. As she is chased by the C.I.A., she gets closer and closer to St. Bartholomew's Cathedral and looks more and more likely to kill the Russian president. Without spoiling anything, allow me to suggest that it doesn't matter whether or not Salt kills the Russian president, nor do her reasons for doing or not doing so, nor does her allegiance really count much towards the resolution of the movie. You will be tempted to think that the film's many flashbacks count for something, but nuclear Armageddon is usually enough to prompt a superspy to action.

Thrillers are essentially elaborate mazes. You put your protagonist at one end of the maze, where she is a secretary/interrogator/single mother/cop on the edge/whatever, wind her up, and watch to see if she gets past all of the obstacles without being shot/ran over/abducted/arrested/blown up. Nothing else matters, which is why we don't see Ted Winter (Leiv Schreiber) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) ramping up the security at the funeral, maybe pleading with the stubborn Russian president to give his eulogy at a later date. When they're not on screen, they're not part of the maze, which is fine. The best mazes are simple. Almost faceless. Salt runs across the tops of trucks, is transported from highway to highway, cliffhangs from an apartment building, leaps from doorway to doorway in an elevator shaft, stalks an underground bunker. Is any of this unfamiliar ground?

The trick is to make it different, make it snappy, make it slick, make it fast, so fast that the movie's Mack truck sized plot holes pass by as blurs. I don't think I've asked myself why they didn't check the Russian defector's shoe for a weapon until right now. If the referees in pro wrestling do it before every title match, shouldn't the CIA do that with every person who comes to them screaming about a fire that has no smoke?

As Salt, Jolie runs, jumps, shoots and gets shot as she's proved she can do since Tomb Raider, but here she does it with a determination that has evaded her in previous roles. Evelyn Salt isn't written so much as a character as an archetype; a pawn navigating from one end of the board to the other. As such, Jolie isn't iconic or even particularly memorable in the role, but she does enough that Salt is always interesting, if not thrilling.

The film's main flaw is its ending sequence, a too-long chat on a helicopter to answer all the movie's non-existent questions with a set of enigmatic non-answers; and its predilection towards the flashback as a means of humanizing Salt. Whenever she needs a breather, we cut back to some forest or some Jeep, and there Salt is with her scrawny husband, who aren't exactly in the same league, but I guess that's love: Rescue an attractive spy from years of North Korean torture in the fall; married in the summer.

Otherwise, Salt is good stuff; a popcorn movie that confidently breezes through its structure and arrives at the finish line without having insulted anyone's intelligence. In this way, it's like the James Bond movies I watched Saturday afternoons on TBS as a kid, which is probably why I almost fell in love with it. Like a Bond, there's never a minute where one is concerned for Salt's safety or even the fate of the free world, but those things, having been pre-determined by the genre, don't matter. The destination isn't what counts, but the route the movie takes to get there. Salt's path is like a rollercoaster's--predictable, but enough to get the blood pumping.