what a let-down just a week after inception!

Rating: 5/10 (26 July 2010)

Just a week ago, me and my friends were returning from a movie hall with our brains in overdrive, trying to decipher the numerous hidden details in Inception. This weekend, we were again racking our brains.....but this time, we were trying to make some sense of the plot which seemed to be heading here, there and everywhere.
The first half of the movie was restricted to Evelyn Salt running, cops (or CIA or FBI or whoever) chasing her, running, chasing, running and chasing. While those stunts could have made hearts miss beats about forty years ago, there was nothing new about them.
Just when you thought that's all the movie had to offer, it took a whole new look - suddenly it was all about assassinating heads of states, and even more amusingly, about nuclear holocausts. If this was what the movie was supposed to be about, why did we have to watch one hour of Salt-on-the-run stunts? It could have been made a lot better if the director had concentrated on the political thriller side of it.
There also seemed to be a lot of impossibilities: Evelyn Salt getting into the underground chamber beneath the White House single handedly, making it look too easy. Ted Winter barely had to bat an eyelid to have the President hostage. I do not know what is the procedure to launch a nuclear attack, but if it was indeed the way it was shown in the movie, sabotaging it seemed to be a piece of cake, the way Ted did. And in the end, though Peabody helped Salt escape, it seemed highly improbable that somebody suspected of preparing to launch a nuclear war would be ferried in a chopper like a common criminal, with just one officer keeping watch on her.
A rating of 5 is justified for the action sequences and the background score, but there's nothing else in the movie. Inception had left everybody hankering for more, but Salt has killed that desire.