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“Salt” is just about precisely what you’d expect it to be, which is both a reward and a disappointment. It ably delivers in the pedal-to-the-metal department, and it dutifully achieves its mission to be the foxy female intersection of Bond, Bourne and “Mission: Impossible.” But it does it all so ably, dutifully and routinely that it’s hard to have an enthusiastic response to it one way or the other. Diverting action and sufficient intelligence aside, reactions to this movie are practically guaranteed to involve shrugged shoulders. It’s a good thing it rests on the shoulders of Angelina Jolie.
Still one of the only women who can carry an action film (Jodie Foster is another), Jolie is terrific at playing thick-skinned, svelte-bodied, iron-willed action heroines. Her vulnerable stuff in average dramas like “Changeling” has landed her in Oscar’s good graces, but she’s always at her best when kicking butt. She kicks it with slick, superior efficiency as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who becomes a fugitive when she’s accused of being a KGB mole. The film is built on the question of whether or not Salt is in fact a villain, and while your better moviegoing judgment insists upon her innocence, one of the greater achievements of the script by Kurt Wimmer and Brian Helgeland is how long it keeps you guessing.
Originally written for a man, “Salt” is an amalgam of spy-movie standbys, from the freeway chases to the rubber-mask disguises to the resourceful escapes to the climactic, explain-it-all speeches. It finds some paranoid buttons to push (namely that which can incite nuclear war), and it’s light on showy effects, but it’s complacent being espionage comfort food.
And with talent like director Phillip Noyce, cinematographer Robert Elswit and co-stars Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, it has a fine pedigree, but all seem to have approached it as a paycheck job instead of a passion project.
That is, of course, with the exception of the leading lady, who continues to command the screen like few stars ever have.
Salt
PG-13
Two-and-a-half reels out of four
Now playing in area theaters
Recommended Rental
A Prophet
R
Available Tuesday
In the epic, Oscar-nominated French crime drama “A Prophet,” rising star Tahar Rahim plays an imprisoned youth who begins serving the mafia from behind bars.
Not since “The Godfather” trilogy have a gangster’s loss of innocence and rise to power been more carefully and flawlessly illustrated. One of the year’s best films.
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