The most impressive feature of Philip Noyce‘s spy thriller Salt is the elegant way in which the viewer is invited along for the ride with its title character. We first encounter Evelyn Salt – a CIA secret agent played with steely efficiency by Angelina Jolie – in a North Korean prison, being tortured but refusing to break. We jump two years ahead and find her enjoying domestic bliss with the German biologist who moved mountains to get her released and about to transfer to a cushy office job at the Agency. All this is turned upside down when a Russian defector walks in and fingers her as a member of a Russian sleeper cell. For reasons not yet clear to us she decides to flee the scene and a chase ensues that lasts pretty much the rest of the movie (as Kirk Honeycutt puts it: “the chase is the whole point”).
What entices us as an audience is the gradual build-up. In the first twenty minutes we see Salt in enemy captivity, playing the enchanting wife and acting all business in a terse interrogation. Just your average spook. But when the chase commences we are slowly introduced to her real talents as she seems to drop her front (and various items of clothing) and builds a rocket launcher from some cleaning chemicals and an office chair. When she dives off a bridge on top of a moving truck a little later we really start to sit up straight, happy to be along for the ride and eager to find out what this woman is capable of. Quite a bit, as it turns out. By the end of the movie her powers have reached superhero-like levels as she scales an elevator shaft in a way that would make Peter Parker proud.
The script by Kurt Wimmer does an excellent job of using very sparse means to set up the basics: a character that we don’t mind tagging along with for the next 90 minutes, a mystery that is just intriguing enough and a romantic back story that makes us care or at least briefly gives half the audience the illusion that Angelina Jolie is not out of their league (if she can fall for a German scientist who studies spiders…). The story gets increasingly implausible in the second half of the movie (with “warmed-over Cold War paranoia” [Justin Chang] at its core) and there is a twist at the end that is a bit unnecessary. But by then we’ll pretty much take whatever Ev (as her boss Ted Winter – played by Liev Schreiber – likes to call her) throws at us.
And what is thrown at us is some pretty gritty stuff. Kirk Honeycutt compares her to James Bond, but this feels more like Lisbeth Salander‘s older sister. The build-up of Salt’s abilities goes hand in hand with the character becoming “more and more ruthless as the film progresses.” (Justin Chang). And this is all right up Jolie’s alley, who projects her “ice cold fury” and “don’t-mess-with-me fierceness” (Kenneth Turan) while serving as “a reminder that even in an era of technological overkill, movie stars matter” (A.O. Scott).
One cannot help but compare Salt to the other major action movie this summer: Knight and Day, with its characters that fail to intrigue us and its muddled chase sequences. What director Philip Noyce serves up here, with the help of Robert Elswit‘s camera work and a distinct lack of CGI gimmickry, sets your pulse racing but maintains the realism of “a dangerous and demanding day at the office” (Kirk Honeycutt). Salt sweeps you off your feet and leaves you wanting more. And judging by the ending, I have no doubt that she’ll be kind enough to oblige.
