Like the part of Kyle Pratt, played by Jodie Foster in Flightplan, Angelina Jolie’s role as eponymous heroine Evelyn Salt was originally written for a man. But particularly when it comes to serious action, Jolie has proven herself singularly able to run with the boys in the Hollywood arena.
There is no shortage of physicality to her role, which begins with a prisoner exchange out of a North Korean camp and then, thanks to a Russian defector naming Salt as a double agent and would-be presidential assassin in front of her friends and colleagues at the CIA, launches into an adrenaline-choked stratosphere of action, pursuit and betrayal.
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Salt
Directed by Phillip Noyce |
Director Phillip Noyce (who previously teamed with Jolie on The Bone Collector in 1999) doesn’t bring much new to the spy paradigm except bleeding-edge production values and a willingness to raise the stakes far higher than most will expect, but he takes on the template with aplomb.
More than once Salt achieves a spellbinding sense of visceral energy, particularly in key action sequences which eschew CGI in favour of real live action, as the James Bond films have been doing of late – and there’s a nod to 007 himself here in the form of deadly knife-blade shoes used during a melee.
Don’t expect it all to make sense afterward; key plot points and character motivations simply fall apart in retrospect, but spared scrutiny Salt is a thrill a minute, a game of cat and mouse between Salt and her now-former colleagues Ted Winter (Liev Schrieber) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who comes off as a character parachuted in from 24) that is unrepentantly, even enthusiastically, preposterous.
But considering the synopsis could be written entirely in superlatives, the action is nicely grounded in coherence, renouncing both the Wachowski Brothers wire-fu and Paul Greengrass’s beloved Bourne “shakeycam” in favour of a much more casual style heightened by an energetic score from James Newton Howard in the vein of John Powell’s work on the Bourne movies and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Most important, Jolie brings something to the role that a Jean-Claude Van Damme couldn’t, something that isn’t even in the script. There is a depth to Salt, a tenderness glimpsed briefly through the Ellen Ripley exterior that makes Salt’s mostly unwritten and unspoken love for her husband manifest and has us rooting for her even when her allegiances are suspect.
Like both Evelyn Salt herself, Noyce’s film is lean and mean and easy to look at. A perfect litmus test movie, Salt is certain to mortify anyone sensitive to violence, cement the beliefs of those who deride the action genre as a wasteland of brainless testosterone, and gratify anyone who gets an adrenaline rush from a well-executed action-thriller.