On paper, Salt must have looked fantastic. A big-budget, action-heavy spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie has everything a summer movie needs — big stars, outrageous set pieces and franchise possibilities. But somewhere between the high-concept premise and the low-rent delivery, something got lost.
Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a field-weary CIA agent who’s nabbed a desk job so she can spend more time with her husband. Which is fine, until a Russian defector walks into her office, revealing Salt as a Russian counter-intelligence agent with plans to kill the Russian president in less than three days. Now, Salt is on the run using her agency skills to clear her name, looking to save her hubby and save the day.
With that foundation, this should have been a fun — albeit mindless —thriller, but high-concept can only take you so far. At 100 minutes, Salt isn’t just far too long, it’s laughably bad.
Part of the blame lies with Jolie. Even with dye jobs, contacts and dental plates, it’s hard to see the character of Evelyn Salt as anyone other than Jolie herself — and perhaps we have the tabloids to blame for that. It’s not long before everything about her becomes distracting. The camera dotes on her trademark pouty lips and tracks her awkward running posture while Jolie sabotages any credibility her character has with every move she makes.
Even if you take Jolie out of the equation, viewers still have to contend with the script. With Salt, writer Kurt Wimmer and director Phillip Noyce are attempting to restart a cinematic U.S.-Russia Cold War, and while it’s an almost quaint respite from North America’s obsession with vilifying the Middle East, populating the film with heavily accented, vodka-swilling Russian spies clad in fur hats is no less offensive.
Still worse than its attempt to reboot Russia-U.S. hostilities is Salt’s shameless attempt to kick-start a franchise. The Bourne Identity this ain’t, and as the camera fades to black on a still-running Agent Salt, we’re left wondering how, with all of the paper-thin characterization and obvious triple crosses, anyone would be willing to follow this character into another film.
Not every summer popcorn flick need be as smart as Inception, but Salt doesn’t even subscribe to its own logic. The film’s best scene features an implausible escape where Jolie bounds between freeway off-ramps, jumping across the roofs of semi-trailers. It’s frivolous fun, but it’s still one of Salt’s few successful moments. Which begs the question: Why does Noyce spend the rest of the film attempting to ground it in reality? That approach worked for his previous films, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but Salt isn’t that type of movie. Actually, it’s the type of movie that reveals its climactic twist about five minutes in.
I can forgive flaws in logic. I can forgive smart characters making stupid mistakes. I can even forgive wasting actors such as Chiwetel Ejiofor and Andre Braugher in underwritten supporting roles. It’s all forgivable if the movie’s entertaining. But it’s not.
Plus, everything here has been done before and done better. Take a rogue agent from Bond, cross it with a double agent from Alias, and that’s the framework for Salt. Which might not sound terrible, but when a much-anticipated tent pole movie such as Salt is trumped by an near decade-old TV series such as Alias, you know that there’s a problem.
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