Salt

It's that time of year for me to catch up on films that I missed on general release and received Oscar nominations. Salt, a big-budget action picture starring Angelina Jolie, got a nod for Sound Mixing.

I kind of liked Salt through most of its running time. It doesn't break any new ground, certainly, but director Philip Noyce and editors Stuart Baird and John Gilroy know how to cut an action scene. But ultimately I have to give this film a thumbs down, as it groans and eventually buckles under the weight of a ridiculous plot.

Jolie is the title character (it was originally written for Tom Cruise, but was feminized for her), a CIA agent. A Russian defector is brought in from the cold (immediately I was on alert--do Russians need to defect any more? Can't they come and go as they please?) and Jolie interrogates him. He spins a wild tale about children who are trained as Russian operatives and then placed surreptitiously in American society, biding their time until they can strike.

Then he casually relays that the Jolie herself is a Russian spy. She denies it, but concerned about her husband, she makes a run for it. Her colleague, Liev Schreiber, and another more skeptical agent, Chiwetel Ejiofor, are in pursuit. Is Salt being set up, or is she actually a Russian mole?

There's some fun stuff early on, especially a highway chase that I enjoyed even though it had Jolie leaping from the top of one truck to another. I've always been a sucker for books or movies that have characters making miraculous escapes. But the film started to lose me when there's an assassination attempt at a church in New York that involves collapsing a ceiling. As my childhood friend and I used to say while watching Popeye cartoons, "Sure!"

The film only goes more haywire from there, culminating in Jolie managing to get into the White House bunker without too much trouble.The script, by Kurt Wimmer, has elements that are common to Cold War paranoia, reminding me most of The Manchurian Candidate. With the film coming out during the first year of Barack Obama's term strikes me as more than coincidental, considering there are some crackpots that think Obama is a Muslim agent anchor baby.

Jolie gives a very physical performance (and she's made up as a man at one point, looking a lot like Rob Lowe), but I fear that since she has become a star that is fodder for supermarket-checkout magazines, she's become less interesting as an actress. Aside from firing guns and kicking people in the throat, she's called upon to do little here than look regal. I wonder about what motivates her choices. Clearly these action-film tent-poles (a sequel is implied at the end) make her gobs more money than the more interesting films she made pre-Brad Pitt, and perhaps she wants to make enough money to fund her various charities. But I wonder if it's too late to rein in her persona enough to lose herself in a small, independent film.