Why name a film Salt? And a Hollywood star vehicle blockbuster at that? This question concerned me before I saw the film, and it and many, many others echoed unanswered around my brain after it had finished. But only for about an hour, after which it is hard to remember much of anything about this contemporary espionage action thriller.
The pitch: Angelina Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn Salt who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Films have been predicated on less, it’s true, but Salt takes minimal set-up to new extremes. In a half-hearted attempt to compensate it scatters brief and unenlightening flashbacks throughout, which only serve to emphasize the shallowness of the exercise.
Within minutes our protagonist is on the run, and watching Jolie run is the true purpose of this film, even though she runs like an eight-year-old girl being egged on by a demanding father at sports day. Salt’s sprinting athleticism does not so much dominate the film as it is the film, her movements through diverse spaces in leaps and bounds operating in the same manner as hyperactive editing in a Tony Scott film, or costumes and masks in a superhero narrative: it is the principle organising schemata around which all else revolves (check out an athletic act of vengeance towards the end, or compare the depictions of her body in the opening and closing scenes). The model is overtly Bourne-esque, but where Damon flinched Jolie pouts, moving as she does into each encounter with the innate knowledge that the framing, choreography and wirework will all be on her side.
Charitable viewers might call the sensations of the first act ‘ambiguity’, although I prefer ‘rudderlessness’. The third and fourth reels appear to have been lost, and moments after her flight from the authorities Salt is embroiled in the assassination of a foreign leader that in any other film would be the finale (it is foreshadowed accordingly, in a manner inescapably similar to that parodied by Shane Black in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and which could be called ‘Power Plant Climax’ syndrome). Having got this out of the way, Salt then casts around aimlessly for more drama, and goes off the rails in the same manner that seasons of 24 were wont to do at about the eighth episode.
The central conceit of highly trained undercover Russians attempts to commingle anxieties of the cold war and contemporary fears of terrorist sleeper cells, but it’s hard not to think of the recently exposed real-life agents in America whose political and strategic irrelevance would have been far more intriguing a focus, and would seem to be a better fit for both this cast (with quiet character actors like Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor in supporting roles) and director Phillip Noyce, whose Jack Ryan thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger would laugh Salt out of the situation room.
Then there’s the racism, which somehow manages to be both outdated and bland while still offending – writer Kurt Wimmer seems unaware that the cold war ever ended, or even that the Soviet Union dissolved. One cannot go too far critiquing the film for its one-dimensional and broadly villainous Ruskies, as the presentation of the American Commander-in-Chief – played, appropriately, by an actor named Hunt Block, who I hope was cast for that reason alone – is stupefyingly basic. President Block’s utter lack of charisma, characterisation, or distinguishing features (even the aforementioned 24 has moved on from white male leaders) seems to codify within Salt a response to any critique of its anti-Russia sentiment.
With an America, and Americans, this boring, we almost cheer the ushanka-wearing vodka-swilling black-coat-wearing Kalashnikov-wielding bastards on for wanting to spice the place up with a little … seasoning.
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