SALT (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Phillip Noyce
Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Daniel Olbrychski, August Diehl, Hunt Block
With her pencil-thin frame and killer lips, Angelina Jolie sprints into action as Evelyn Salt, a CIA op who may also be a Russian mole. It starts out with Angie in her underwear being tortured by the North Koreans, and ends with her, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's an old-school, Cold War setup tossed into the 21st century, as if the spy game that started way back when had taken on a life of its own. It's not even clear what these people think they're fighting for, but it's the only game they know. Angelina could be a double agent, or a triple or quadruple one. It's hard to tell, and it hardly matters. The movie's like a cartoon: It moves real fast, the action never lets up, and the stunts are as preposterous as the odds that our heroine could survive them without breaking every bone in her body. At the risk of giving too much away, let's just say that by the end of the film, Jason Bourne's not the only lethal undercover agent at large in the land. Evelyn Salt is out there, too.
