Assaults the senses

Rating: 3/10 (26 April 2013)

Jason Bourne in skirts. This loud, frenetic actioner surrounding a nasty Russian plot (new Cold War story-lines are back in again, it seems) to use "sleeper" agents to bump off the President and trigger a war, the plot obviously dreamt up just at the time when real-life Russian agents were being exposed in the States. But what approximated to topicality at the time just seems ridiculously far-fetched now.
Besides the Bourne comparison above, there are elements of Bond, Die Hard Mission Impossible and "Taken" undoubtedly hoping a little of their franchise magic might catch on (It seems "Salt 2" is on the way), but other than putting a woman in the lead role I don't see anything really distinctively different here to that seen previously in the examples I mention above.
So, inevitably, we get a pounding, headache-inducing James Newton-Howard soundtrack, impossible stunts, none more than Jolie's truck-hopping display early on, twist after twist as the ridiculously contrived plot hurtles to its conclusion and a final last-gasp save, just as you'd expect.
The acting throughout is perfunctory, the characters imbued with as much depth and personality as computer game ciphers. Jolie is certainly athletic and gets to run and jump a lot but in the end this only serves to remind us of her previous incarnation as Lara Croft.
In the final summary, with its mis-calculated new Cold War rhetoric and mindless action sequences, this is really just a movie that wants really to be a computer game, in fact I'm only surprised that unlike "Tomb Raider", the game, on this occasion, didn't come first.