REVIEW: Salt

A BUMPY RIDE

The best thing to be said of Salt is that it's much better than Angelina Jolie's last action outing in Wanted. But coming from director Phillip Noyce, who made his best work in the 1990s (Patriot Games, Clear And Present Danger, The Bone Collector), it has a strangely dated feel and a lingering sense of deja vu. Besides which, while Jolie may have her own loyal following (wherever it may be), she looks too brittle to pass off as a female action hero of the Bond and Bourne variety, crashing her way through life and performing death-defying stunts as a matter of routine. And then you have a plot that makes a lame attempt to revive the cold war between America and Russia with a premise that seems tantalising, but highly improbable. 

It's a play-by-numbers piece. Evelyn Salt (Jolie) and her fellow secret agent (Liev Shreiber) are about to go off duty when a Russian suspect lands up and makes the shocking pronouncement that the Russian President is due to be attacked at the funeral of the American Vice-President in New York a couple of days later. And, that the killer is none other than Salt. So now she's on the run, her husband is missing and the entire might of the state machinery is against her. 

Then there are the Russians, who've apparently trained her since childhood to infiltrate the American secret service and now want to make sure she finishes her mission. Yet she'll always be two steps ahead of them all, walk across building ledges, jump off speeding vehicles on busy highways, run barefoot through snow and leap off helicopters to emerge unscathed from the river! She's also a master of disguise (passing off very successfully as a man at one point) and will eventually achieve whatever she sets out to do, while the cops are left clearing up the mess.

Jolie rides on her star power most part of the way and her character's need to search for her missing husband gives the narrative its emotional quotient, thereby preventing it from being reduced to pure action drivel. For that matter Salt isn't entirely dull. It's like watching the 100th re-run of a film you'd once loved and can no longer remember exactly why.