Stroke-Inducing Action Movie.

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2011)

The Soviet Union, dead lo these many years, is revivified and set to its evil work again in this political chase story. I'd like to call it a "thriller" but it's not. It's a "chase story." You see, Angelina Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a high-level CIA type in Washington, working under her company friend, Liev Schreiber. Jolie is their Russian expert and the movie opens with her interrogating a Russian defector. The defector tells the skeptical Jolie that the USSR planted a dozen moles in the US back in the 1980s. The mission of the moles: to assassinate the visiting president of modern Russia while he attends the funeral of his good friend, the Vice President of the United States, in New York. Russia will take this as an American plot and start vamping up its missiles. America will have to retaliate. Chaos will follow.
How -- you, the discerning viewer, ask -- how did anybody in the decaying USSR of the 1980s know what the international situation would look like in 2010? And what -- you ask -- do these Soviet moles hope to gain from a nuclear war? Those are good questions and it does you credit that you've asked them. No, really.
But that's nothing compared to the questions raised by the rest of the movie. First, let me limn in the general style of this commercial Schlagfest. During the opening scene, when the defector is describing the moles, he ends by saying that one of the dozen specially trained agents is named Evelyn Salt. Well, gosh, that's JOLIE. The CIA observers on the other side of the glass wall gasp. It's impossible. But then Jolie, with the flimsiest of excuses, departs the premises in a crash of glass and a leap from one window sill to another, one hundred and forty floors above the tiny street below. The CIA goes ape chasing her, and so does the FBI. Oh, the Russian defector escapes too. (What IS a "Russian defector" anyway?) So, after the first five minutes a pursuit begins, with Jolie running through the streets in her bare feet, pursued by various agents of social control. Let me think. There are lots of bullets, a razor blade concealed in the tip of a boot, karate chops all over the place, cars careering down interstate highways, a motorcycle maybe, tear gas, and hand grenades. At the thirty-minute point, with my heart pounding and my tongue lolling out in a way Jolie's never does, I began to wonder how long this chase is supposed to last.
It lasts the entire 100 minutes. There are pauses now and then but just for a few seconds, not long enough for anyone to catch her breath but long enough for one or another character to explain why this next chase is about to take place. It's like pornography. The sex scenes have to be linked by SOME kind of phantasmic narrative before the brawny handyman and the glossy masseuse are hauled in.
Angelina Jolie is adequate in the part. I was never convinced of her acting ability, always distracted by that queer splanchnochranium and puffy collagenic lips and that inimitable rack of hers. She's unbelievable here, though not more so than the rest of the movie. She's given the powers of a superhero in a comic book. She can slide down ten floors of an elevator shaft just using some slots in the walls. (I won't even get into the rest of it.)
You know what was a good chase movie with political overtones? I thought "The Bourne Identity" was pretty good. It's not the genre that's offensive; it's the producers' conviction that if five minutes go by without somebody's head getting wrenched off, the audience will walk out. Okay, the less discerning viewers may ask why, if I detested this movie so much, I sat through it without my synapses being fused like those of any other ten year old. Maybe it was only through the seasonable interposition of a Gracious Providence that I alone am escaped -- to tell thee.