Film Review: Salt

Once again the United States is subject to annihilation, and guess who the dastardly culprits are? Why, it's those nefarious Russians naturally. Again. As far as imaginative plots go, Salt doesn't have one. Touted as the 'female Bourne', Salt doesn't display nearly half the intelligence as the masterful trilogy featuring everyone's favourite, 'Matt Damon' (Team America voice). Essentially, Salt is a series of bombastic crescendos, awkwardly put together with a story scarcely believable. Female Bourne this film is not.

Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent who goes on the run after a Russian defector accuses her of being a Soviet sleeper cell whose mission is to assassinate the Russian President, triggering World War III. Fleeing the CIA, Salt must stay one step ahead of her pursuers and rescue her kidnapped arachnologist of a husband. As you might imagine though, all is not as it seems.

The world created by director Phillip Noyce here is preposterous by any standard. While most fiction does indeed require you to suspend belief, which is fine, by the same token I do not like being taken for an idiot. The idea that former KGB cells embedded in the highest echelons of the US government, ready to take down the 'Great Satan' on a whim is something even L. Ron Hubbard would call 'far-fetched'.

Yet, Salt does have some redeeming features. Even though the plot is garbage, we are invited to consider the possibility that Salt is not a heroine but a villain. It is a mildly enjoyable development to consider the unknown and actually begin to hope that she might succeed. Some of the action is actually pretty cool as you watch Jolie's femme-fatale bounce off walls in crazy death defying shenanigans taking out scores of highly trained assassins. It is difficult to imagine if Anna Chapman would have lasted any longer than five-minutes attempting the same thing. However these set pieces are also the film's downfall. After the first twenty minutes the film descends into quite literally one action sequence after another as dialogue takes a back seat.

This is a film which revolves around Angelina Jolie, but the world which Noyce constructs around her is scarcely satisfying. The reason that spy films work in the first place is because they have some degree of plausibility and the twists may have some baring in reality. Salt does not have this and it suffers for it. It is littered with numerous implausibilities and characters to the point where it all becomes a tad ridiculous. Salt bounds along at a frantic pace and does enjoy some degree of never being entirely predictable, but in the end it is a bloody load of nonsense.