Salt         


Fans of coherently-staged action sequences will be delighted to learn that someone remembered to bring a tripod to the set of Salt -- one of the only actions movies of the last few years that doesn't require heavy doses of Gravol to enjoy.  Ever since The Bourne Supremacy, it seems that action movie directors have been engaged in a long, drawn out competition to see who could shake the camera around the most.  With Salt, director Philip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence) has done something truly radical: whenever a stunt is about to be performed, he points the camera at the person performing the stunt, then -- even more audaciously -- he double checks to make sure that the camera is in focus.  The result is an uncommonly entertaining, non-headache-inducing thriller.

While it's easy to tell who is kicking, punching, and shooting at who, the overall plot is less comprehensible.  In the opening sequence, a mysterious man strolls into a covert CIA office building, presents himself as a cancer-stricken Russian defector, and warns of a sinister Soviet-era plot to overthrow the US government via dozens of sleeper agents -- all of whom were apparently trained from birth at a top secret compound in the middle of the Russian wilderness.  One of these sleeper agents, he reveals, just happens to be the woman who is interrogating him, Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie).  Her response to these allegations is to construct a make-shift rocket launcher out of household cleaning products and a fire-extinguisher, blow up a chunk of the building,  and then flee on foot, thus initiating a chase scene that pretty much lasts the entire movie.

At first, the plot is only moderately silly, but it gradually becomes more and more ridiculous as it goes along, until at last the movie becomes one of the strangest ever made by a non-avant-garde filmmaker.  It's written by Kurt Wimmer, author of last year's Law Abiding Citizen, which had Gerard Butler carrying out a series of elaborate assassinations from a jail cell -- sometimes with the help of a robot.  That movie was fairly absurd and far-fetched, but with Salt, he has outdone himself: Law Abiding Citizen looks like a documentary in comparison. 

Critics who complained about the dream sequences in Inception not being dream-like enough should be appeased by Salt.  Although it doesn't contain any dream sequences per se, the movie's too-surreal-to-be-in-a-cartoon action sequences, constant plot twists which blatantly contradict earlier scenes, and bizarre presentation of how thermonuclear war is conducted all seem like something out of a dream.  And also like a dream, it's entertaining enough as it's unfolding, but instantly forgettable once it's over.  Which is to say that the movie accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.


inMovies Rating – 7/10