The ad campaign for Salt centers around one ominous question: Who is Salt? Ad nauseum, the movie's story centers around this, too.
Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a relatively normal woman who works for the CIA in what seems to be the capacity of interrogating suspected spies. We learn she's specially trained in a bazillion different ways to be a spy, like fightin' and shootin' guns, and although she's behind a desk most of the day, she is not to be trifled with. (Even in a pencil skirt, she is able to take down a SWAT team.) On the day of her and her loving husband's anniversary, a strange Russian defector named Orlov waltzes into the agency, and, due to him being some random and mysterious Russian guy, needs to be questioned. As Salt begins the interrogation, Orlov gives Salt and us, the audience, a thorough background on infamous Russian KA program, a program believed to be a myth, which takes in children at an early age, trains them in spy stuff like lethal combat, teaches them how to be American in order to blend in, and then throws them into the U.S. with the intention of doing some serious damage from the inside when they get older. Years, sometimes decades, pass before they make their move.
Orlov makes what seems to be an absurd accusation that Salt is one of these Russian KA program spies, and that she is planning on assassinating the Russian president at the recently deceased American vice president's funeral in New York City. Why kill the Russian president? Because a member of the CIA offing the Russian president would no doubt put the U.S. and its allies in a tough spot. Orlov refers to it as Day X, the day that a great war breaks out which would inevitably lead to the downfall of the U.S.
Salt goes on the run in order to find and hopefully protect her husband, whom she believes is in grave danger due to her new predicament. The CIA obviously sees this as fleeing and gives chase. Is Salt really a spy? It's complicated, to say the least. It's not easy to go into much more detail without revealing important plot turns, but what can be said is that the movie too often toys with the audience. There are twists, and there are turns, and each one seems to serve as telling the audience that they've been rooting for the wrong person. It isn't until the very end that we finally discover, in the most basic sense, who is good and who is bad. It's because of this sad fact that there is about a sixty-minute period during which we lose any “good guys,” other than the rather stuffy and somewhat obnoxious CIA agent Peabody, played convincingly enough by Chiwetel Ejiofor. His function is to find Salt and bring her in while trying to convince Liev Schreiber's character, Ted, another agent, that Salt might not be who she says she is. The story loses direction for about an hour and relies heavily on action sequences which, unfortunately, are sub par at this point and can't carry it without someone to care about.
The painful part is that the action didn't have to be subpar if there hadn't been so many cuts. There are a couple of great visuals that, while defying logic, please the eye, but too often did a lot of the simpler, cooler stuff get hacked up by the editor. Exchanges of gunfire and punches were chopped to bits to become nothing but blurs and whip pans underneath the sounds of bangs and crashes. By the end of gunfights you just sort of wait for the camera to steady so you can see who got shot and who is still standing. Of course, it's usually Salt who is still standing, but that's not the point.
It isn't until the very end, when all the pieces are laid out, that we know whom we should have been rooting for the whole time. Frankly, by this time, it's most likely too late in the game for the audience to reboot the part of their brains that involve sympathy for a character, and it's all too easy to shrug our shoulders when the credits begin to roll. Even with the decent twist at the end that is enough to make the audience slap their foreheads in a grand “duh, how-did-I-miss-that” kind of moment, we are without the hero we want for most of the movie. Worse than that, we learn to really hate some characters we are supposed to like by the end.
The conclusion leaves it open for possible sequels. It would be wise for these not to be made. Salt tried to do in one movie what the Bourne films did in three, so there's no telling what kind of unnecessary havoc Salt 2 would wreak upon us. Apart from a couple of clever twists, the movie has nothing going for it other than some decent visuals which weren't all that impressive, and nothing we haven't seen before.
"Salt" opens July 23, 2010 and is rated PG13. Action. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Written by Kurt Wimmer. Starring Angelina Jolie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski, Liev Schreiber.
