Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
Wow. Salt’s a little tough to describe. If you watched the trailer you’ll know that the setup is that Angelina Jolie plays a U.S. intelligence operative named Evelyn Salt. When a Russian agent turns himself in, Salt interrogates him to find out what information he has that is worth their time. He tells her that a Russian agent will try to kill the Russian president in New York, and tells her that the agent’s name is Evelyn Salt. From there, Salt is on the run, but is it because she’s a Russian agent, or because she’s trying to stop the bad guys and clear her name? The answer’s a little complicated.
I think I saw one review that compared Salt to the Bourne Identity. But imagine if throughout the Bourne Identity you had no idea what Bourne’s motivations were, or whether he really did have amnesia, or was just faking as part of some elaborate plan. That’s pretty much Salt in a nut shell. At first when fingered she acts confused like she doesn’t understand how this could possibly happen, but then later on she acts like she knew she was a Russian spy all along. But she doesn’t do what the Russians want her to do, and winds up killing the two lead bad guys that we see in the movie (and a whole bunch of lesser bad guys). So if she did remember who she was the whole time, at what point did she change her mind and decide to be on the side of America? The movie doesn’t make any of that clear.
If the audience doesn’t know what is motivating the main character in the movie, you’ve got yourself a movie that’s tough to engage with. In playing Jason Bourne, Matt Damon gave us a character we could related to. How would you feel if you woke up on a fishing boat with a laser code embedded in your hip and no memory of how you got there? What made that relatable is that we knew what Bourne was feeling as he reacted to these things.
Clearly this is the fault of the director and possibly the writer, but Angelina Jolie doesn’t help this problem at all. She’s very good at playing the tough female lead, but she tends to do it in a very cold, calculating way. Consider how much better the movie would have been if Tom Cruise had played the lead, as was originally planned. Stay with me now. I know Tom Cruise isn’t the most popular guy anymore, and he always pretty much plays Tom Cruise in anything he’s in. But the one character he always plays is full of emotion. It would take a lot of work for Cruise to play a very emotionally cold character. Ultimately, he would have been better in the role.
Salt was directed by Phillip Noyce, who directed Patriot Games, one of my all time favorite movies. It was written by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote Law Abiding Citizen, a movie I praised highly last year, and the fantastic Equilibrium, which you should run out and find a copy of right now if you haven’t seen. With that kind of talent I’m not sure why Salt isn’t a better movie.
The supporting cast is pretty good, particularly a couple of favorites of mine: Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor. They were as good as they always are, they were just wasted in this lackluster movie.
The film has great action, and even has a decent story. It’s just a failure because it keeps its lead character’s motivations too hidden for us to really root for her. It also suffers from a bad ending. Sometimes when a movie ends you just want it to go on and on, especially when it’s clearly setting up the next movie. Salt, on the other hand, has an ending that sneaks up on you, and leaves you feeling unfulfilled. One of those where you go, “That’s it? You’re ending the movie there?” The problem is, I’m not that interested to see where they go from here.
