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MOVIE REVIEW: SALT

Although not in the same league as the Bourne Identity, Salt has the same espionage/superhero atmosphere that made the movie so appealing. Suspension of disbelief is needed for both, but for Salt, you really have to park your brain at the door. Not such a bad thing. But what Salt lacks in coherence it makes up in sheer force. You might not know why Salt is doing what she’s doing, but you know while you’re watching that Jolie knows. Australian director Phillip Noyce (Dead Calm, The Bone Collector, Patriot Games) and the very impressive and always beautiful, Angelina Jolie, make a very entertaining, fast moving spy thriller that’s over before you know it. And for all of Jolie’s fame and over exposure, she can still be convincing and she can still deliver a kick-ass performance. That’s always the question…right? Can we forget she is Angelina Jolie; married to Brad Pitt, mother of six kids, ex-wife of Billy Bob Thornton, Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, heavily tattooed and John Voight’s daughter. To her credit, you can.

The film evokes one of Russia’s most famous urban legends. Several movies and a bunch of 1960s TV shows revealed that the Russians found American citizens with Russian ties, trained them at secret spy camps and planted them in the U.S. as deep cover sleeper agents that could be utilized when the time was right to bring down the United States. Two of my favorites from this genre are the old Charles Bronson, Telefon (1977), and the Kevin Costner-Gene Hackman thriller No Way Out (1987).

Written by Kurt Wimmer, Jolie stars as one of the CIA’s top field agents, Evelyn Salt. Her career is thrown into turmoil when a Russian defector Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), walks into CIA headquarters and claims that a Russian double agent is about to assassinate the Russian president when he visits the United States. That agent is Evelyn Salt. Salt doesn’t stick around to be locked up until the matter of her loyalty is straightened out. She escapes in an awesome sequence at CIA headquarters that Mission Impossible man Ethan Hunt would envy, followed by a dynamic combination foot, car, truck, and motorcycle chase in Washington, DC. Her chief pursuers are her CIA boss who believes she has been framed; Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and the counterterrorism agent Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who cannot afford to believe anything until he has concrete evidence. I’ll say no more. Go see it. It’s good fun; not rocket science but who cares.

p.s. The term “suspension of disbelief” was coined by poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor in 1817. It describes the need to believe a premise which you would never accept in the real world. In genres such as fantasy and science fiction, things happen in the story which you would not believe if they were presented as fact. In more real-world genres such as action movies, the action routinely goes beyond the boundaries of what you think could really happen. In order to enjoy such a story, the audience engages in this phenomenon. It is a semi-conscious decision in which you put aside your disbelief and accept the premise as being real for the duration of the story.