SALT

This film was advertised in its run-up to release as a female Jason Bourne movie and while there are similarities, I don’t think that is a terribly good comparison.

This story starts by showing CIA agent Evelyn Salt being released from a North Korean prison, bailed out not by her Agency superiors, but rather by her husband, a German national that has nothing to do with the CIA.

After this we see shots of the boring everyday existence of Agent Salt as the world isn’t constantly going up in flames and needing the attention of every super-agent out there. For instance, a Russian man turns himself into the CIA and says he wishes to defect. Salt balks on taking the lead in the interrogation because she has anniversary plans with her husband. Her superior, Ted Winter (played by Liev Schreiber), also balks because he has a plane to catch and is tired at the end of a long day.

However, they both come back and help interrogate the potential defector and in the course of the interview/interrogation, he implicates Evelyn Salt as a Russian agent, not knowing that she was the one interviewing him.

The next hour and a half is almost pure action with a few breaks to take a breath as Salt tries to outrun (literally, then figuratively) the CIA agents trying to catch her and bring her in for questioning. Before I continue, isn’t it interesting that whenever a good guy agent is implicated in some huge conspiracy, they always run, citing the need to “clear their own name”? You never see implicated agents cooperating with the investigation and letting the proper due process clear their name for them. Well, the latter makes a terrible movie… maybe that’s the answer…

So, from this point on, I’m not sure I trust myself to keep everything under wraps so…

CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!

RATING
PG-13 for scenes of intense action and violence

This movie is intriguing to me because if I had to peg a movie franchise that it is closest to in terms of action, gore, and language, my first inclination would be James Bond. Some people might say the Bourne franchise but the action sequences ring totally differently to me.

There is a lot of violence in this movie (after all, it’s about spies and sleeper cells that are very well trained in the skill of killing people) but there’s not a whole lot of gore. In the Bourne trilogy, there is a fair amount of blood because no matter how well these agents are trained, they can’t teach them not to bleed. Bourne has a limp in one leg for most of the second and third movie and he comes out of nearly every fight scene with blood oozing from somewhere that is visible.

By contrast, James Bond (before Daniel Craig that is) just didn’t seem to bleed. He would get in fights, he would get the you-know-what beaten out of him, and he would have bumps and bruises to show for it. I understand that make-up and choreography are much more believable now than they were in 1962 when Dr. No came out but still…

To wrap it all up, in this movie Salt does bleed after several fight scenes. However, if they had made the amount of blood seen more realistic like the Bourne trilogy, I have no problem believing that this movie would have been rated R. Did they reduce the visible blood to get a PG-13 rating? It would hardly be the first time…

Lastly, I would put this in the category of the James Bond films where Bond is played by Daniel Craig. This movie is suitable for a wide range of audiences but before you take your small child to see it, make sure they can handle it.

AUDIENCE
CHILDREN – 2

Some kids are advanced for their age and can handle the mature concepts and themes of this movie. As a rule, I think the rating system devised by the MPAA is pretty good at pegging when the average person is mature enough to handle the concepts of a movie. Therefore, children under 13 years old may not handle this material as well as older people.

What do I know though? I saw my first R-rated movie when I was 9 so to each his own.

YOUNG MALE/FEMALE – 7/5

Honestly, if this movie was made several years ago, the “male” side of this rating would have been a bit higher. Truth be told, in my mind, Angelina Jolie isn’t quite the movie star that she was a few years ago. She is still a good actress and a good many guys out there still think she’s one of the most attractive women in Hollywood and I can’t disagree but she seemed to inspire a flock of younger, very attractive actresses that are realizing the way into men’s imaginations is to do action movies (I’m talking to you, Scarlett Johansson).

Still, an action movie with Angelina Jolie as the lead is still a big draw for adolescent males and I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it many more; any movie that can be spun as showing how tough women can be and how they can compete in any field with men is going to go over well with a lot of women, young and old.

ADULT MALE/FEMALE – 8/6

Angelina Jolie is not getting any younger and the crop of men that have watched her become a movie star over the past ten years are aging with her, hence, the male rating goes up slightly.

My reasoning for these ratings are virtually the same as they were for the young male/female classes but were slightly higher because of the overall maturity level and the content of this movie that caters to more mature audiences.

GORE – 7

As I said before, Salt contained very James Bond type levels of gore; there was just enough to make it look real but not enough that it would bump the rating up to R. All in all, job well done.

ROMANCE – 3

There was sort of a romantic subplot and it didn’t quite ring true to me and after avoiding the subject for so long, this is when I can’t hold back the spoilers.

The main premise of the film is that Salt actually is a Russian agent but she has a change of heart and she has to “complete” her missions to make sure someone else doesn’t do it for her when she goes rogue. In other words, the only way to protect the targets that she is supposed to kill is to eliminate any potential threats around the targets. This leads to utter mayhem in which the principal targets sustain minor injuries.

The part that doesn’t ring true is why she eventually turns her back on her parent Russian organization. It appears outwardly that she did it because they killed her husband. This seems odd in movie terms at least because secret agents don’t fall in love and if they do and something happens, they never get that personal again (see, Casino Royale – 2006).

For some reason, Salt going on this rampage of death and destruction and bringing down the entire sleeper network partially because of her husband’s murder doesn’t sit quite right with me.

DIALOGUE/SPECIAL EFFECTS – 5/6

This movie wasn’t heavy on one-liners or complex special effects but the movie did seem pretty plausible, which is one of the best things I can say about a movie based on reality. Neither of these categories went out of their way to enhance the experience and neither of them got in the way of the experience; hence, middle-range ratings.

STORY – 7

This was a very odd twist on the usual rogue spy story. Traditionally, there is no truth to the rumors of being an enemy spy and after all is said and done, the superspy receives a medal for their efforts to save the world while their own parent agency was looking for them.

In this movie, she actually IS a Russian spy but has a change of heart and now has to go out of her way to avoid the good guys, find and kill the bad guys, and not get shot herself. In the end, when some of her efforts come to the attention of a particular agent, instead of getting her name cleared, which he knows will take forever, he aids in her escape right under the noses of two agents that have no job but to watch their prisoner (Salt).

In my humble opinion, this story would have been better as a 24 type TV show instead of a movie. One of the best aspects of this movie was the knowledge that enemy agents could be anywhere and you start to wonder who the next one is going to be. You especially start to wonder how high the infiltration can go if the main character turns out to be a “bad guy”. I can’t help but think that if they had turned that into a TV show, it would have been better. Of course, it also would have been compared to 24 for its entire run on TV… maybe a movie was a better idea…

ACTING – 7

Angelina Jolie is good. Liev Schreiber is good. Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my favorite “supporting role” actors. While the plot seemed a bit farfetched, these three actors went a long way to making it much more believable.

INTANGIBLE – 8

A lot of these points come from chase scenes and escape scenes, both of which seemed to me to be the most unrealistic parts of this movie. However, they were something I’ve never seen before and when it comes to the spy genre; I can say that I’ve seen most of it. Jumping from semi to semi on a network of highway overpasses was a very novel idea even if it would have ended in catastrophe in real life. Salt’s frequent escapes from unwinnable situations start to wear thin but when it really comes down to it, nobody in Hollywood knows what an honest to god sleeper is capable of so they have plenty of latitude when it comes to an on-screen portrayal. Overall though, I enjoy a good chase scene and while this one doesn’t measure up to Bourne (any of the three movies), it was still very enjoyable.

TOTAL SCORE – 71/120
ADJUSTED – 59

All in all, it’s an action movie. It doesn’t appeal to all people but the people that it does appeal to will thoroughly enjoy it.