Movie review: Salt
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Date Posted:
August-31-2010 11:05
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Is she sodium chloride incarnate? Is she the second coming of Lot’s wife? Of course not – this is Hollywood. She’s a woman with balls to burn, played by Angelina Jolie, in the new action flick from Aussie director Phillip Noyce.
Evelyn, as her friends call her, works for the CIA. Come to think of it, you never get to meet Ev’s friends. No time, you see. The edict from Columbia Pictures is obvious: in every scene, action trumps emotion. Sheesh. Even the chick in
Alias had buddies.
Salt has a stable career, good hair, delicate bone structure, a happy (and plot-satisfying) marriage to an arachnologist, and a dog. Don’t know what Strata would make of that but the shaggy bugger seems well-behaved enough.
Things suddenly take a turn for the worse when a Russian defector names her as a double agent. Then things take a turn for the obvious. There’s a series of high-octane chases that the ingenious Salt escapes, barely intact. Well, her hair escapes intact but one would assume she sustains substantial bruising and soft tissue damage – especially in the highway sequence.
After about four plot twists that screenwriter Kurt Wimmer probably found written on the back of a coaster at a bar while he was thinking of ways to develop Salt’s character, we reach a conclusion that isn’t a conclusion but instead an open invitation to potential investors to fund
Salt 2: Meaner and Saltier.
The action is good but much of it is also implausible. Jolie is good but her role isn’t. The plot is convoluted and sometimes threatens to be interesting but doesn’t really work on any level. One thing
Salt does have going for it is that its villains aren’t of Middle Eastern descent. Nice to see some relics from the Cold War going after freedom and the American Way for a change.
You’ll leave the cinema and make the obligatory comparisons to the
Bourne movies. Sure, there are a few. Both are fast-paced actioners with political undertones and stoic titular characters who possess freakish physical abilities. The one major difference, however, is that while the
Bourne trilogy is great,
Salt is not.
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