After seeing Angelina Jolie and Liev Schrieber talk about Salt and its deep textual layers, complex character stories, and levels of deception at their Comic-Con panel, I got the impression that this movie was going to be a twisty thriller with surprises and depth. After seeing Salt, I’d have to amend that to “Salt is a thriller that thinks it’s twisty and has a lead character with some dimensionality.” I can see the poster blurb now. Spy thrillers are always fun, and in that capacity Salt is no exception. Watching a glamorous and sexy individual be resourceful and bad-ass on the fly is perpetually entertaining. We fantasize that we too would be smart enough to know what to do or could elude our pursuers with such panache. It’s a little adorable that the bogeyman for America in this thriller is Russia. The Cold War being over for almost 20 years makes the whole Soviet spy angle quaint and fun, plus we get to listen to those sexy Russian accents. Here the baddies are carrying out straight assassinations and mini-camera spy missions, rather than smuggling dirty bombs and making Eastern religions look bad.
Not long ago, Salt had Tom Cruise attached to play the lead, which was originally written for a man. Some fuss has been made about this, but the core story really isn’t very sex-specific. Salt the movie is still nowhere near as smart as its titular character, Evelyn Salt (Jolie). Like the Cold War era from which it hails, the story’s plans for its arc and denouement are transmitted and intercepted by us in the audience with precious preamble. Perhaps all that gender reassignment script doctoring would have been put to better use making all the “big twists” less agonizingly obvious. We are more faked-out waiting for an expected fake-out revelation than we are by the actual fake-out we already predicted.
Evelyn Salt is very, very smart — from MacGyvering a bazooka out of common office materials to calculating speed, trajectory, and gravity on the fly, she’s got a big old brain in her head. Jolie famously does a lot of her own stunts, and here she really kicks it up a notch, so it’s easy to be impressed by all that dazzle. Salt is dazzling to watch, big visceral fun, but by the time we come to the inevitable stand-off of foes, the film collapses on itself, having run out of ideas. The high-stakes tension is lost under the weight of Salt’s own sense of intrigue. Please don’t get me wrong, all the principals’ commitments to their characters and the surprises they think are surprising are given their full range of skill, but really Salt is just a fun whiz-bang dollop of espionage with a near-irrelevant underpinning.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 7/23/10
Time in minutes 99
Director Philip Noyce
Studio Columbia Pictures