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Angelina Jolie delivers. Boy, does she.
In "Salt," a spy thriller that is as taut and muscular as its heroine, she appears fearless as a CIA spook named Evelyn Salt accused of being a Russian spy.
Ms. Jolie has become the female version of Tom Cruise, doing many (although not all) of her own stunts, including sidestepping barefoot along a building ledge 12 stories up and crouching atop trucks motoring along a highway. Even if wires or harnesses were involved, it's pretty impressive.
- Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
- Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action.
The movie opens in North Korea as a bloody, bound Salt is being tortured. "I'm not who you think I am. ... I am not a spy. I am a businesswoman."
Her business is spying, but we soon begin to wonder about her first assertion.
Two years later, a Russian comes to a secret CIA location in Washington, D.C., and spins a story about a top-secret spy school that indoctrinated Russian children in all things American, from "The Brady Bunch" to popular board games. They were being trained to be sleeper agents as part of a grand scheme to eventually destroy the United States.
The stranger (Daniel Olbrychski) also shares an alarming tidbit about a Russian spy who plans an assassination during the funeral for the U.S. vice president. The Russian's name? Evelyn Salt, the very agent calmly interrogating him.
She insists that is ridiculous but bolts, in a shower of explosions and daredevil maneuvers, in search of her husband (August Diehl). Like an Olympic sprinter, she goes on the run through D.C., New York and beyond, generally outsmarting the CIA colleagues chasing her.
Chief among them is sympathetic pal Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and counterintelligence officer Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who wants to bring her in and bring her down. Just who will be left standing at the end is best discovered on your own, as the story unfolds like Russian nesting dolls being opened and opened and opened.
Director Phillip Noyce, son of a man who worked for the Australian equivalent of the OSS, knows his way around this world, having made "Clear and Present Danger" and "Patriot Games" with Harrison Ford as CIA analyst Jack Ryan.
"Clear and Present Danger," released in 1994, clocked in at 140 minutes, and Mr. Noyce doesn't make that same mistake here. Audience attention spans have shrunk since then, and he smartly wraps up "Salt" in 100 tense, tight minutes, to a drumbeat of James Newton Howard music.
The screenplay is by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote the recent "Law Abiding Citizen" with its corrosively cynical look at the justice system and contributed to "Street Kings," with its corrosively cynical look at police corruption and cop-cowboys.
"Salt" originally was Edwin Salt, but the spy in the long shadow of the Cold War was changed to Evelyn Salt once Ms. Jolie expressed an interest. The boys of summer audiences will be happy to know that dialogue and pesky personal flashbacks are kept to a minimum, and she appears briefly in her undies.
This is virtually all action all the time.
Near the end, a person acts impulsively and out of character, and that twist serves the movie but not the logical moviegoer. On a small, nagging note, a glorious love affair seems wan.
Audiences also have to be willing to accept that Salt is a one-woman wrecking machine who can take down bigger, heavier men as though she were Clint Eastwood or Bruce Lee in his prime. Given recent revelations about Russkies among us, "Salt" isn't quite as far-fetched as it may have seemed a year ago.
Even better, though, it's darned entertaining.
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