Loving wife or ruthless killer spy? Or both?

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2015)

"Salt" is a spy thriller directed by Phillip Noyce starring Angelina Jolie. The writer is Kurt Wimmer and you may have seen "Law Abiding Citizen" from him. Or "Total Recall" which was released after "Salt" though. For Jolie and Noyce, it is the second collaboration after "The Bone Collector" over 10 years earlier.
The film starts with a Russian suspect actually telling that Jolie is a Russian spy and her identity as a CIA operative is fake. She flees right away, allegedly to find her husband, so we are never sure what she really is. Initially, I thought the Russian guy tried to frame her and she is really innocent, but when she is in the metro or later kills the Russian president, we find out there is obviously truth involved with what the Russian guy said. There were few really great moments in this movie, but it is a good watch from start to finish. Special mention to August Diehl, who is becoming quickly one of Germany's most notable Hollywood actors alongside Brühl and two-time Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz if you count him (he's Austrian).
Sometimes the whole Jolie against everybody (Koreans, Russians, Americans, her own husband) plot felt unrealistic as it was simply too much centered on her and sacrificed credibility for that. Also, it is really enough to (try to) kill either the Russian or the American President in one movie. It doesn't have to be both of them. Actually, I would have liked this film to end after 55 minutes with her having killed the Russian President and being arrested. But obviously it did not as we also still had to find out what was going on with her husband. Afterward it was maybe one or two plot twists too many although I liked the scene in which she kills Schreiber's (pretty underrated actor) character almost at the end. The actual ending then really offers room for a sequel and it does not look too unlikely. So maybe we will be getting "Salt 2" in 2 or 3 years time. If we do, I hope they manage to take the strengths from the first film and include them again, but maybe without the clichés and without 100% focus and heroism on Jolie. Instead, some more realism please. One example for this was when Schreiber's character tells her that he was top of his group, the best of them all. That moment I knew he would fight Salt later on and lose the fight as this film won't miss a chance to tell everybody that Jolie (and her character) are the best and nobody else is.
So yeah as a whole I enjoyed this movie and I recommend watching it if you are either very much interested in spy thrillers or just a big Angelina Jolie fan. I just wish they would have chosen a more convincingly realistic approach to some of the dramatic scenes such as not all doors would have closed the very moment Jolie's character was about to run through them early on for example.