Salt is an action/spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Eijofor, August Diehl, and Daniel Olbrychski. It's written by Kurt Wimmer (whose track record is spotty to say the least) and directed by Phillip Noyce, which only registered with me because he also directed The Saint.
Anyway! Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA super-spy who, after getting out of torture in North Korea in a spy swap, gets married to a very nice German scientist (Diehl) and is putting in for a desk job when a Russian defector named Orlov (Olbrychski) fingers her as a deep-cover Russian operative who's being activated to kill the Russian president. Salt flees, with her boss Ted (Schreiber) and counter-intelligence operative Peabody (Eijofor) in hot pursuit. She's looking for her husband, but instead of doing that directly, she does the job, killing the Russian president, because twist, she really is a Russian deep-cover op!
She hooks up with Orlov and the rest of her "class" from the Red Room deep-cover school, but they kill her husband in front of her, and so she kills them all, and then makes continues on with her mission, which is ultimately to nuke Mecca and start a war with "a billion Muslims" to destroy America. Oh, and Ted is also a Russian op. There's lots of them.
I remember liking this movie when I first saw it, and I dunno, the action sequences are decent, and Jolie, Schreiber, and Eijofor turn in solid performances. But, like, I dunno. This was good until we had Atomic Blonde. Salt just doesn't have a solid sense of style, and the fact that there are three different cuts of the movie on the DVD (one of which has an entirely different and overlong ending) indicates to me that they weren't entirely sure what they wanted to do, here.
Plus, just on a story level, Salt has to beat the shit out of a lot of innocent people (or rather, cops and so on just doing their jobs). Some of them she shoots to incapacitate, and it's clear the movie is really stretching so she doesn't become the bad guy by killing everybody. But like, I have a hard time believing that the most expedient way to get what she wanted was this ridiculously elaborate plan to fake killing the Russian president (twist) with spider venom, after blowing him right through the floor of St. Bartholomew's in New York?
The movie feels like it wants to be grounded, or at least have some sense of gravitas, but the action is over the top and yet stunted at the same time. It's fun to watch in the moment, at least until Salt's husband dies, and then it just gets uncomfortable and that's only about a third of the way in. Overall, it's kinda forgettable.
My Grade: C-
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: The Santa Clause
No comments:
Post a Comment