Salt

Reviewed by Marc Glassman

Salt
Phillip Noyce, director
Kurt Wimmer & Brian Helgeland, scriptwriters
Starring: Angelina Jolie (Evelyn Salt), Live Schreiber (Ted Winter), Chiwetel Ejiofur (Peabody), Daniel Olbrychski (Orlov)

It’s summertime and the blockbusters come freely,
The popcorn is jumping
And the customers are fried
Our brains turn to mush
As the plots we decry
Hush, sombre critics,
Don’t you cry.

Remember when baseball and hockey teams were franchises? Now blockbuster movie producers have taken over the term as they spend millions of dollars creating action figures—hate to call them characters—and using special f/x teams to entice the public to be propelled along by the latest jolt-a-minute thriller.

When it works, everyone is a winner: the producers make back their millions—and much, much more---while the public is diverted for a week or two. Which leads us to Salt, the movie—not the condiment.

This attempt at kick-starting a new spy-thriller franchise is being generated by old pros. Producer Lorenzo di Bonavenura is the man behind G.I. Joe and the Transformers series, films based on Hasbro toy figures. Phillip Noyce has made occasional forays into serious cinema (Rabbit Proof Fence is a very strong film about prejudice against natives in Australia), but he made his money directing Harrison Ford in the Tom Clancy hits A Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. Scriptwriter Brian Helgeland “ghosted” one of the better Bourne films Supremacy and Angelina Jolie was an “awesome” Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.

Points can be given to the producers for making Salt a woman—or should we start calling Ms. Jolie “wonderwoman”?—except that the original choice for the film was Tom Cruise. It was only when Cruise realized that the superhero agent being created was similar to the one he was already playing in the Mission Impossible series that the script was reconfigured for Angelina’s impressive frame.

So what’s the skinny on Salt? One thing: the fates couldn’t be more favourable. The idea of a Russian sleeper spy cell waiting to be activated in the United States decades after the death of the Soviet Union would have seemed nonsensical until about a month ago when headlines proved that pulp fiction can come close to documentary truth.

The notion that Evelyn Salt, a super successful C.I.A. agent, might be a Russian spy doesn’t seem completely crazy—all of a sudden. That is, until you see the gal in action. Ms. Salt is one lady you wouldn’t want to annoy on a first date: she has an arsenal you can’t imagine. Trap her in a room for two minutes and she’ll turn a fire extinguisher, lighter fluid, a modernist empty-down-the-middle table leg, a match and some available toilet rolls into an incendiary bomb launcher. Handcuff her in a car surrounded by trained agents and she’ll head butt one, kick the other in his privates, grab a gun, clobber the driver on the back of his head and use his semi-conscious body to ram his vehicle into five collisions before driving it over a bridge into a truck—and then escape unnoticed by the crowd or the police.

Me? I think I’d take Ms. Salt out for cocktails and keep the conversation amusing and inconsequential.

Salt, like the high concept Inception—a far better film—and most blockbuster fare is built around chase sequences. Hollywood has never done action scenes as well as they do now—and Noyce is a past master at executing such moments. Salt is filled with astonishing scenes, the best of which—an assassination attempt at a church in New York—is truly bravura. And Ms. Jolie is a fabulous action figure. Heck, I’ll admit it: I’d rather see her kill 30 bad guys than Tom Cruise any day.

What about the story? Both the Russian and American Presidents’ lives are threatened and nuclear war is a real possibility towards the film’s conclusion. It’s spy vs. counterspy vs. spy in a nice replay of many espionage thrillers. We’re mainly concerned with whether Evelyn Salt is truly a Russian agent or a conflicted but patriotic American.

Ms. Jolie performed many of her own stunts—there’s less CGI f/x than usual in this film; in fact, she was briefly hospitalized during the shoot due to injuries sustained on location.

Should you see Salt? Do you like it with butter on your popcorn? The answer: sure, if you go to movies all the time, looking for fun. If not, there’s only seven weeks until TIFF begins.