Solid Summer Popcorn, The Movie Salt!
From start to finish, “Salt” is the very definition of a solid summer popcorn movie: fast, exciting, suspenseful, adrenalized – and, most important, smart.
Also: highly implausible. When a friend of mine asked what I meant by that, I quickly ticked off a list of events in the movie that could not happen in reality (among them: At one point, Angelina Jolie leaps off a moving subway train in a tunnel, threads the needle between steel pillars and emerges unscathed). In conclusion, I said, “It’s a Hollywood action film – of course, it’s implausible.”
But that’s what movies are for: to take us out of our own lives and plunge us into a world we could never actually inhabit, to enjoy thrills while suspending disbelief. It’s not a question of plausible or implausible; it’s whether the story sweeps you up in such a way that you either don’t think about or don’t care that it stretches reality. It feels real enough to hold you rapt and not make you say, “No freakin’ way.”
So it is with “Salt,” in which Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a covert CIA operative who, ostensibly, works for a petroleum company in Washington, D.C. One day, on the way out of the office, she’s called back to question a walk-in: a Soviet defector who claims to have information about a mole at the CIA.
One hitch: The double-agent he names is Evelyn Salt. Even as the Russian is escorted out, Salt is being sequestered for questioning. But she’s also quietly freaking out because she’s worried that this is a plot in which the Russians are going to go after her husband. So, given an opportunity, she slips out of the building to go find him – which makes her an instant suspect and fugitive.
Her best friend at the agency, Ted (Liev Schreiber), refuses to believe that she’s a double-agent, but he can barely restrain Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the agent leading the charge to recapture Salt. But Salt is like a female Jason Bourne (except she knows what she’s capable of) – and no one’s going to take her without a fight and a chase.
Salt, the defector claimed, is a sleeper agent who has been activated to murder the Russian president, who is scheduled to appear in New York to deliver the eulogy for the recently deceased former U.S. vice president. So Salt heads to New York, ostensibly to foil that plot and clear her own name.
Or does she? The film begins to drop broad hints that, in fact, the outlandish story that the defector was telling – about Soviet-trained sleeper agents implanted in American society as children and kept at the ready until triggered to action – may actually be true and that Salt may really be who she is accused of being. Director Phillip Noyce, working from a script by Kurt Wimmer, keeps the audience guessing with reversals, double-crosses and other tricks salted throughout the story, like tripwires waiting to be detonated.
As noted, it’s all highly unlikely (look at the sleeper agents planted in Yonkers and all the high-level info they were able to make off with) – and yet told in such a speedy, economical way that you don’t really have time to think about how much of it is completely bogus. Part of that is Noyce, a director who knows his way around a suspenseful action beat. But a lot of it is Jolie.
Jolie, first of all, is a gorgeous woman with an inscrutable face that makes her perfect to play a master spy. Secondly, she has a lithe physicality that makes her believable as an action hero, capable of slicing through an army of operatives from any country with ruthless precision. Finally, her beauty itself is a weapon, capable of seducing her quarry either through pure animal magnetism or as a disguise for deadly intentions. Even her smile can kill, it seems.
She gets solid support from Schreiber, as the pal who’s pushed to the brink in his willingness to stand up for her, and Ejiofor, who is fine in a role that mostly calls for him to run and glower. But this is Jolie’s movie – and she does fine work evoking interior emotions of someone whose life and career depend on her stoicism.
“Salt” is terrific fun, a movie calculated to make your blood race and your breath catch. Hard to swallow? Au contraire – it goes down as smoothly as you please.
Kevin
