Salt: Meet Bourne’s Missing Sister
You said the popcorn had free refills, now you tell me that doesn’t include more butter? Would you like to reconsider that arrangement?
Rating: 6 out of 10
Right off the bat, I want to publicly denounce anyone heard using the joke, “So the sequel to this will be called Pepper, right?” or anything that resembles it. Those people should be terribly, terribly ashamed of themselves.
Thank you. Now I will move from that soapbox to my other soapbox.
Salt follows the dramatic chase, catch and escape of an American CIA agent named Evelyn Salt. A Russian defector gives up secret information which claims Salt is a deep undercover mole, thereby sending her into a cat-and-mouse game played throughout the halls and caverns of American secret agencies. She is forced to cleverly evade and attack her enemies, her friends, even her former boss in an effort to prove who and what she really is.
Salt blasts into action incredibly quickly, which works well for its rather small 100-minute time frame, but in their efforts to hit the ground running, they left out one incredibly important portion of the common hero/anti-hero story – we – the audience, need to care. Angelina Jolie brings the razor’s edge to her intensity and the constant use of her powerful stare, but she gets precious little time to try and makes us feel anything for her character. There are tiny flashbacks here and there to expose a loving relationship between her and her husband, who is kidnapped early in the film, but it never quite rings true and feels like it was dropped in only by necessity. As I noted in the title, there are glaring and obvious comparisons between this film and the Bourne franchise, but Matt Damon was given great opportunities to bring the audience into Jason Bourne’s dilemma and struggle through it with him. Also, the romantic aspect to that original movie was one we got to witness growing on screen, unlike the momentary recalls in Salt, which failed to generate any flutters of the heart.
Yet, for what Salt lacked in the emotions department, they valiantly tried to make up for in the action arena. Jolie gets chased through nearly every type of structure known to man (sewers, church bunkers, packed highways, etc…) and shows herself to be quite the athlete when it comes to jumping off of nearly every set piece in the film, moving and stationary. Brief glimpses of déjà vu attacked me through the screening as I recognized the same Jolie we all rallied around in her Tomb Raider days. There were also a couple Matrix-ish moments of her using the now popular “jump-push off the wall punch-kick” maneuver, which made me wonder what it would have been like if Jolie had donned the black pleather jumpsuit of Trinity (after a few moments I realized she probably would have overwhelmed any scene she was in, so Carrie-Anne Moss was indeed the better choice). There was an attempt to bring a little more weight and depth to the film by using continuously solid actors like Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, but while Liev gets a bit more meat packed into his role, Chiwetel ends up very much on the short end of the stick, saddled with one of the only story-changing arcs in the story, but absolutely no time to bring it to a full and believable fruition.
The End of the Page Recommendation: Salt delivers high-paced action, but fails to combine it with real meaning.
What did you think? Does it end up on your list of ‘Top Female Action Flicks’?
Tags: action, angelina jolie, bourne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Chiwetel Ejiofor, editorial, Espionage, fiction, Liev Schreiber, Matrix, matt damon, movie, opinion, review, Salt, spy, the end of the page, thriller, Tomb Raider
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