Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
7/25/10
Angelina
Jolie stands alone as the greatest female action star in movie history.
Others (like, for instance, Carrie Anne Moss or Linda Hamilton) have owned
a single role, but Jolie is the only woman who's been able to do what the
guys do: persuade in any action role, do any stunt that comes her
way and, above all else, sell boatloads of tickets in the process.
A key is the fact that there's not a drop of Girl Next Door to her appeal:
as beautiful and sexy as she is, the former Lara Croft looks and carries
herself like she can kick your ass and knows it. As a result, she
can be beaten to a bloody pulp and one never feels the need to turn away
or run to her aid. She's a big girl, she can take it. The sad
thing is, we've yet to see the action screenplay capable of doing full
justice to her star power. The nifty Sky Captain and the World
of Tomorrow provided her with a wonderful supporting role (and an eye
patch), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith rocked for a while but ran out of
gas about a half hour before the credits rolled. So a chance to be
the star of a great action movie still eludes her, and Salt has
not changed the situation. There's a whole lot wrong with Kurt Wimmer's
typically gonzo screenplay, starting with the fact that its feature length
shell game holds the characters at a distance compounded by Philip Noyce's
typically chilly direction. But Jolie is fabulous, the action sequences
are as bone-crunching as they are numerous, and some of Wimmer's crazy
ideas are delightful. Salt will probably leave you wishing
for better rather than wanting more, but it's a passable summer time-waster.
Two
years ago, CIA agent Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) was a prisoner of North
Korea, released thanks to the lobbying efforts of her boyfriend Mike (August
Diehl) and the pragmatism of her boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber).
She marries Mike and settles down into a happy desk job when a Russian
defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrycheski) shows up at the Agency's doorstep.
He tells interrogator Evelyn a shocking tale of Russian spies raising children
as brainwashed sleeper agents to take the place of Americans and wait for
the sinister Day X when they will unleash terror upon America's shores.
On that day, one of these agents is to travel to New York City and assassinate
the Russian President, and that Agent's name is Evelyn Salt. Unsympathetic
agent Peabody (Chiewetal Ejiofor) wants to see Salt locked down before
she can prove the defector right, but Ted defends her even when she makes
a run for it in search of Mike, who won't answer the phone. She finds
their apartment empty with evidence of a struggle and continues on the
run. But as Peabody and Ted pursue her in an ever-escalating series
of wild chases, it's unclear whether her goal is to find Mike or Russian
President Matveyev (Olek Krupa). Orlov has also escaped custody and
is on the run: could he be telling the truth? Is Day X at hand?
Because
the “what the hell?” nature of Salt's plot lingers well past the
halfway point and questions about Evelyn's loyalty persist down to the
final ten minutes, the film is designed to engage the mind far more aggressively
than the heart. The problem with that strategy is that an action
movie is built on the notion that we'll bond with the lead character and
fear for their safety as they run from one death-defying stunt to the next.
If the worst things we hear about Evelyn Salt are true, then we should
really be rooting for the anonymous police she keeps mowing down (always
shooting to wound, mind you) instead of the woman leaping from one high-speed
vehicle to another. So the experience of watching the movie is more
to marvel at Jolie's skills than to connect with her character. And
those skills are marvelous. She reportedly did most of her own stunts
and dominates the screen with her icy charisma. Jolie leaps from
one high-speed vehicle to another, often from impossible heights, hurls
grenades and machine gun fire like she was tossing out the trash and can
stage a mighty ferocious fight with a guy twice her size. So, if
she's not a Russian spy, this Evelyn Salt chick is pretty damn cool.
She
leads a mostly first-rate cast. Schreiber enjoys terrific chemistry
as her long-time pal and confidante, and Ejiofor nails the dogged pursuer
role without ever seeming malicious. Olbrychski makes an outstanding
Cold War boogyman. But the Mike role is every kind of miscalculated,
starting with the casting of Diehl, who strikes no sparks with Jolie and
plays the role at an odd coffee commercial pitch. You've probably
read a thing or two about how the producers changed the spouse role after
Jolie replaced Tom Cruise in the lead, but that swap seems to consist entirely
of the unconvincing business about him lobbying for her release from North
Korea. Otherwise, poor Mike isn't just “the woman”, he's practically
a cardboard cutout. And while daytime TV veteran Hunt Block has a
perfect name to be both a soap actor and the US President, he plays the
role with that softness and confusion that's leeched into our cinematic
Presidents post-Bush and doesn't muster a whole lot of “somebody save that
guy, he's The President!” empathy.
As
I mentioned, Wimmer is the looniest active screenwriter (ever seen Ultraviolet?),
and Salt is jam-packed with gloriously preposterous violence and
terrorist schemes of ridiculous levels of chutzpah (even I had to gasp
when one Day X terrorist announces where he wants to strike with a stolen
nuke). There's even a reversal in the final scenes that genuinely
took me by surprise. But the film's most audacious concept is also
its most tiresome: that Salt represents the beginning of a
franchise pitting Jolie's killing machine against the remnants of the KGB's
diabolical schemes. Once, maybe, but if you're going to keep going
to that well, she might as well take on Kaiser Wilhelm's forces in the
sequel.
For
that matter, I'm not sure how much demand there'll be for a Salt
sequel, any more than people have clamored for the return of Kaiser Soze
in Usual Suspects 2. Salt spins our heads for 100 minutes
on the question the poster so prominently poses: “Who is Salt?”
We get our answer, we go home, and an adequate time is had by all.
Meanwhile, the search continues for that female Die Hard Angelina
Jolie really needs to make before her career is done. |
