Features > Movie Reviews > Salt…

Angelina Jolie’s latest spy movie opened in North America just weeks after the news broke about Anna Chapman and the ring of Russian sleeper agents. Not only that: Evelyn Salt, Jolie’s character, plays a CIA agent who is debriefing a Russian defector when he warns that the Russian premier will be assassinated on American soil in a few days time, by a Russian sleeper agent… an agent by the name of Evelyn Salt.

Awkward! Salt’s colleagues put her in a locked room while they try to sort this out. Meanwhile she’s more concerned for her husband, a civilian whose life, she reckons, is in danger. And in a plot development that puts the US intelligence agencies in a rather dubious light, in quick order both the defector and Salt escape from the building.

Are we to assume she’s guilty as charged? Not necessarily. Her fears for hubbie seem to be well founded. But her motivations are hard to read, and the evidence against her mounts up. As for the Russian politician, his chances don’t seem good.

Director Philip Noyce recently revealed that his father worked for the Australian intelligence service during WWII. It doesn’t make the wildly improbable convolutions of Salt any more credible, but it may account for the (relatively) realistic approach he takes to the film.

Students of moviemaking should study how different the big chase sequences in this film and “Knight and Day” are from each other. In both, the movie’s central character operates on a superior physical level to everyone in pursuit, but in Noyce’s movie at least the laws of dynamics still apply. We have a pretty good idea that Angelina Jolie isn’t going to end up splattered all over the highway, but Noyce allows us to entertain that possibility (a thrill for some people, I’m sure).

The ‘realism’ of Salt owes something to Paul Greengrass and the Bourne films. Though Noyce doesn’t take the handheld, fast cut style to the same extremes, he does adopt the same breathless kinetic pace (the movie is a drum tight 93 minutes). Crucially, this is for most of its running time a CGI-free zone. It’s telling that when Noyce does use a digital effect, for a big explosion for example, the movie’s credibility immediately takes a hit. Equally importantly, Kurt Wimmer’s script links all the second guessing about mixed allegiances and double crosses to a fundamental investigation into Evelyn’s psychology. It’s not just the CIA in the dark about where her true loyalty lies, she may not be so sure herself.

Jolie has the credentials to handle both parts of this assignment: the movie makes the most of her action movie athleticism (allegedly she did several stunts herself) and her acting chops. There’s excellent supporting work from Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski and other spell check favourites, and stellar work from composer James Newton Howard and DP Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood).

To reiterate – it is still an incredibly audacious yarn. But you want to go with it and see just how far ‘far-fetched’ can stretch.

This is one of the better surprises of the year. Fans of Nikita and The Manchurian Candidate (of either vintage) should be right in their element.