Salt is the latest action flick taking advantage of Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft Tomb Raider creds. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt a self-assured blonde who is rescued from a North Korean prison and is later caught up in a web of international espionage, or is she?
At the beginning of the movie, Jolie is in a hurry to go home and celebrate her second anniversary (traditional-cotton or modern-china) with arachnologist husband, Mike played by August Diehl. Salt married Mike after he secured her rescue from North Korea because all arachnologists are that internationally well-connected. Rather than cotton or china, Mike gets more than he bargained for, perhaps.
On her way out of the office, she's stopped by coworker Ted Winter, played by Liev Schrieber, to interview a man described to her as a Russian defector. Winter had joined Mike in the North Korea rescue, but made it clear to Salt that it wasn't his idea to rescue her. Salt and Winter are buddies so she agrees to stick around for 20 minutes to help him out with this defector.
The defector, Orlov, played by Daniel Olbrychski, turns out to be a sort of father figure to a group of American's who were taken to Russia as children to be turned into moles that will somehow harm the U.S. by setting off global nuclear war with Russia. Lee Harvey Oswald was described as the first of such brainwashed American children (groan in unison now).
Salt is flippant with Orlov because his story seems like nonsense to her and he doesn't even seem to want to defect. Then, he tells her and everyone listening behind glass that Salt herself is a Russian spy assigned to kill the fictitious Russian President who just happens to be visiting the U.S. to attend the funeral for the fictitious American Vice President with whom he was close buddies. Another of Salt's coworkers, Peabody played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is assigned to deal with Russian defectors and decides that Salt must be questioned. He he convinces Winter to take her to an interrogation room. Orlov escapes allowing Salt to do the same. This allows Jolie to shed her shoes and underwear wrapping the latter around security cameras to mask her location.
Salt seems to be trying to find Mike under the theory that if someone has blown her CIA cover, he'd be in danger. She goes back to her apartment, knowing the CIA agents will be looking for her there to make sure a neighbor girl will care for and feed their little dog. She also takes some spy equipment and one of Mike's unlucky spiders.
Then, Salt escapes out the window just as agents break into her apartment and proceeds to act somewhere between a concerned spouse looking for her endangered husband and a Russian spy out to make her first kill to begin the cycle that will result in global anarchy. She makes her way out of DC making several narrow escapes from the CIA involving fast cars, trucks and motor cycles along the way. She goes to New York of all places to lay low and avoid law enforcement. She poses as an Hispanic woman to check into a NYC hotel with a fake passport. That's where she does the quickie dye job that looks completely professional and the spider meets the business end of a syringe as Salt prepares to do her duty.
Now, we have the real Lara Croft action character, dark, sexy and mysterious. Eventually Salt makes her way to Orlov and someplace controlled by this network of Americans turned Russian spies as children. There are a few flashbacks and we get the idea that she had some childhood friends in the who then turn up as adults to either help or hinder her in her mission, to save her husband or sabotage the U.S. on behalf of Russia. Mike is there too, but she now tells one of her co-collaborators that she only married him to look normal.
We're not done. Salt accomplishes one mission in New York and is back, gets caught, escapes and is back on the run. She ends up with one of the other Russian-made American moles using a NATO mission as cover, cuts her now black hair short to pose as a man and gets herself into more international espionage trouble. Now, they're going to nuke some Islamic countries to set off global war. Salt seems to be working for both sides, but finally figures out and reveals the identity of the real bad guy.
Ok, she rescued the dog. That's a plus. The spider met a bad end, but I'm not a fan of those big meaty spiders anyway (I don't mind the skinny leggy ones). The rest of the movie is a bad circa 1950s-60s cold war cliche. The Russians are out to get us, using our own to do it and we have to out them. Where is Joe McCarthy when you need him?
Salt doesn't even make sense internally. It begins with one of the cold warriors favorite conspiracy theories, that Russia brainwashed Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy, but if Jolie was in that crop she'd be way older than me and too old to be jumping between fast moving trucks on the expressway. It fails to account for changes in power in Russia and never explains how this secret survived the end of the real cold war.
The movie only succeeds in feeding American paranoia over anything and everything international. Everyone is out to get the good old USA, and while the plans to take down the Americans are engineered in Russia, they will be carried out by Americans. What a wonderful justification for ridding the nation of those pesky civil liberties from that confounded Constitution that forgot to reign in citizens while freeing multi-national corporations.
No cats were eaten in the movie and the dog was rescued, so I'll give Salt one cat treat for that and some fast-moving action. Let's just hope Mark Kirk doesn't use the story of how he used spider venom to prevent global war as the basis for his senate campaign.
Salt. Directed by Philip Noyce, screenplay by Kurt Wimmer earns one cat treat**
**Not so good, little redeeming value, and not better than TVLand reruns.
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