Salt Lake Tribune Review

The thriller “Salt” is like its star, Angelina Jolie: lean, sexy and all business.
It’s a movie that gets the job done, as director Phillip Noyce delivers pounding action and exciting chases with efficiency — though with a slightly dour attitude.

Jolie plays the title character, Evelyn Salt, who’s as sharp a spy as the CIA employs. She’s also happily married to Michael (August Diehl), a German-born spider expert who proved his love two years earlier (as seen in the movie’s prologue) when he lobbied successfully to get Salt sprung from a North Korean military prison. Now, she works quietly undercover in a D.C. office building, processing intel with her partner, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber).

One day, a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) walks in to make a startling confession: There’s a sleeper agent, a holdover from the old Soviet days (shown in flashbacks), buried deep in the CIA. Also, Orlov claims, this agent will assassinate the Russian president the next day in New York, at the funeral of the recently deceased U.S. vice president.

Salt thinks his story is ludicrous until Orlov reveals the name of the sleeper: Evelyn Salt. (Insert dramatic sting, courtesy of bombastic composer James Newton Howard, here.)

Thus begins the chase, as Salt quickly tries to outrun the CIA agents who want to keep her under wraps. The chase runs through the streets of Washington and New York, with Salt outwitting Winter and a CIA counterintelligence officer, Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and seemingly confirming that she’s a baddie after all.

The truth is more complicated, though in the bare-bones script by Kurt Wimmer (“Law Abiding Citizen”) there are exactly two plot “surprises” — one telegraphed far in advance, the other thunderingly obvious.

Noyce moves the action with the same street-level grit that he employed in his two Tom Clancy adaptations, “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger,” and brings the tension right up to the audience’s noses — particularly in a car chase in which Salt tries to escape from the back of a New York Police SUV. Noyce also crams a lot of action into 100 minutes, though in the process some subtlety (along with most of Andre Braugher’s performance as a White House bigwig) gets lost.

The problem with “Salt” is that the tone is too grim for an action movie. There’s no sense in Jolie’s performance of the adrenaline rush that Tom Cruise brought to “Knight and Day” (a telling example, since Cruise turned down “Salt,” when Evelyn was named Edwin, before taking that movie). Jolie knows how to do action with tongue planted in cheek (“Wanted,” for example), but in “Salt” she doesn’t seem to be having any fun at all.

-- Sean P. Means

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