That’s not Angelina Jolie, that’s a Man baby! Mangelina. Ok, you won’t understand that comment until you catch the new action flick Salt in which Jolie plays a bad ass secret agent. Salt is on the one hand a typical by the numbers action movie that’s elevated by Jolie’s presence, on the other hand it tries to be “smart” and have a lot of twists, but ends up having long sequences of convolution.
It’s hard to write this review without giving away Spoilers, but there are several moments in the film that makes you scratch your head and go what’s going on here? But it all comes together nicely in the end. It seems like Jolie desperately wants to be an action star, she was fantastic as Fox in Wanted, but she ups that here by the very nature that she’s in every scene and she doesn’t have to play baby sitter to some whiny punk throughout the entire movie. So she’s free to be all she can be.
Without that albatross around her neck she’s really able to shine here. She gets to have a couple of soft, tender moments in the beginning with the man of her dreams, Mike (August Diehl) who saves her from a North Korean prison in the beginning. The movie tries desperately to make us care about this milk toast and fails. This guy is so bland that he makes Avatar’s Sam Worthington seem charismatic. It’s a problem because when Evelyn Salt (Jolie) goes rogue it’s because she cares so much that her husband may be in danger.
Just because she says she loves him, doesn’t mean the audience is going to buy it. Angelina puts no emotion at all in these scenes and August Diehl looks completely lost. She and Liev Schreiber, who plays her CIA handler, work well together on screen. You actually feel like there’s a real relationship and friendship there.
There are some weird moments: there’s a scene where Salt is standing outside an event and the next she’s in a subway. So we’re to believe she risked being spotted instead of going directly via train? Also she can easily roll into a fancy hotel the night before a major event? But really it’s an action movie so I don’t spend too much time worrying about logical leaps. Director Phillip Noyce does a great job of keeping the pace up so you really don’t have much time to dwell on these moments.
At one point the script goes completely off the rails when we get the first reveal. The beginning and progression of the scene makes no sense, then the conclusion of the scene leaves you going, what just happened here? One of the obvious plot twists you can see coming a mile away but the movie does a decent job of misdirecting you for most of the film until the final reveal. And Angelina does a great job of playing the “victim” that at times you have no idea whose side she really was on – America, Russia, her own? Again this is where the movie fails because a lot of her motivation is tied up in what happens with her husband and that relationship is never believable.
With an action film you really need to only ask two questions – is the action good and do you like the characters? There are occasions when the story and characters outweigh bad action – The A-Team is an example, but at the end of the day I really liked Salt. It had good action (not innovative), decent story and I wouldn’t mind seeing a Salt sequel. When the movie ended, I felt like I watched a very good television pilot – which isn’t a bad thing.
Final Grade B
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 07.23.2010