SALT (2010 - Cert 12A)

Angelina Jolie is and has been a lot of things. She's Jon Voight's daughter, she's a serial adopter of kids, she's been accused of being a home wrecker and madder than a box of frogs. As far as her professional career goes she's won an Oscar over ten years ago (Girl, Interrupted) and then made some bad choices, given some terrible performances, Tomb Raider and Alexander, but recently, with A Mighty Heart and Changeling, seemed to have turned a bit of a corner with turns that convinced people that she had talent and might just have that credible career ahead of her that was promised a decade ago. Since those two films she's turned her hand to action flicks, firstly with Wanted, and then Salt.



Jolie plays Evelyn Salt in what is not a musical biopic of one half of 80's female hip hoppers Salt-n-Pepa, but actually a government/CIA, post-Cold War tale of spies. We are introduced to Salt in a Korean prison where she is being contained and tortured for being an American spy. She manages to get out through a diplomatic exchange and then we see her a couple of years later back in Washington in intelligence and security offices looking, in all honesty, just a little bit too glam for that job. A mysterious Russian then comes in and accuses her of being a Russian spy and claiming that she will make an attempt on the Russian leader's life. This rings alarm bells for her intelligence colleagues and lock her down so they can investigate, only for her to break out and make a run for it as she desperately tries to get to her husband.

If it all sounds at all original, I can assure you it's not. If Bourne helped to reboot the Bond series, it's also spawned a number of copy cats, and this is one of the biggest that there is. It looks the same, all be it in a slightly more colourful and polished way with steadier cameras. People talk the same and governments have the same plans. It starts off interestingly, I wasn't quite sure where it was going to go and how it was going to play out, but needless to say though, not is all as it seems and there are a number of twists and turns, some utterly predictable and others that do catch you off guard, but the fact that are so many only lessen the impact of those that do work. It all quickly descends into nonsense and gets more and more far fetched by the minute, asking for a huge amount of suspension of disbelief from the viewer. That needs an investment from us though, and we're only going to invest if we like the characters or feel a connection to them. However, the characters just aren't characters I'm afraid, there only to serve as exposition or to get bumped off. The supporting cast is decent, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor are probably the most notable names, and they do as best as they can without being given any depth at all by the script. They jump between expressions of confusion or anger. And that's about it.

Jolie herself, as the lead, has the most interesting character, although that isn't saying much. I sensed that she tried to play it in the same understated way that Matt Damon plays Bourne. I'm not really sure why, but it all falls flat on its face. While Bourne was troubled with a real dark side, Salt comes across as a bit stroppy and completely two-dimensional. Like a fembot witth PMT. It's not totally down to Jolie, she doesn't have a lot to work with at all, but she is capable of doing a much better job than she does here. The other problem is that she's meant to be hard as nails but she looks emaciated and in need of a decent meal, it just isn't convincing when she is smashing people around with her bare hands and jumping from moving truck to moving truck. The action is very well done, handled by Phillip Noyce, seasoned director of Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. There's a good sequence in a New York church, although it's again let down my it's implausibility, and a good death involving a pair of handcuffs and a railing over a big drop. However, I'd like to think these days that I might take more positives away from a film than those two things.

Bourne appears to have become it's own genre now, which is all very well, but when films just don't compare to it, lazily copying the formula, there is little or no point in doing it. Tom Cruise was originally due to play Salt, before pulling out to make Knight and Day. If he were in it, it would have taken the only original aspect out of the film, a heroine rather than a hero. Worryingly the ending, after a laughably absurd climax, hints at the possibility of a sequel, which, if it does happen, is going to have to be a hell of a lot better than this.