Some people must like Angelina and action more than a plot

Rating: Null/10 (3 August 2011)

How I have entitled this review is, at any rate, the only basis on which I can understand anyone seeing this film as other than a more or less complete waste of time (there are three versions on the DVD - this review is based on the director's cut). And yet more people have given it five stars than one to three stars put together: they must like the actress or the action so much that they can forgive the fact that, in trying to surprise, the plot just doesn't work.
Oh, I did like energy of the trailer (which, as far as I remember, just featured Angelina Jolie with dark hair, and so couldn't have taken footage from the first half), and I know that action in action films doesn't have to be totally credible, so I decided to buy the DVD to watch as a bit of excitement. That said, her jumping eight floors down a lift-shaft from one set of girders to another several girders down (and not being heard or hurt), for example, is a bit unlikely, as is, however fit one is supposed to be, running (as she does in her other hair colour) long distances with what turns out to be a very heavy load, whilst wearing a thick coat and a knitted hat, without once breaking sweat. (Ladies don't sweat?)
But it is the plot from which no amount of action, or liking for the looks of Angelina (who, in the trailer, had been striking with her long dark appearance, but the trailer doesn't even appear to be on the DVD), can draw one's attention - with a film concerning agents, one knows that there is scope for betrayal, and for misplaced trust, but, to my mind, agents can only double- or triple-cross for so long before one's interest in whose side anyone is 'really' on must surely wane, and, with it, the desire to see the action unfold.
In the dialogue, there are even attempts to justify earlier actions whose appropriateness to whatever that person was trying to achieve (which itself did not really make any sense) is wholly dependent on Salt making escapes in the most implausible circumstances: looking back, they could never have been envisaged by the speaker at that time. For none of the rest of the film could have happened without Salt: escaping from a barricaded room in a most unlikely way and against all the odds; having been allowed to get out of the building and home with time to get together whatever she wanted; and then not having been caught when trying to run away again, not even when cornered with her hands up. The ineptitude that allows her to get where she does, and then just disappear, beggars belief!
The most striking visual indication that the director is attempting to make one trust characters and their motivations being true, only to seek to surprise by changing them, is the switch in hair colour. In that persona, Salt carries out actions to satisfy someone else that she herself should be trusted, one of which, in relation to her husband, she need not have done (since she regularly overpowers a whole host of armed men, and, in this case, does so shortly afterwards anyway), and the other of which (as an attempt to surprise not only us, but her latest set of colleagues) beggars belief - unless they didn't happen to be in on the plot, they would not have pronounced someone alive who had mysteriously been found not to be dead, since they wanted him to have been assassinated by their enemy's forces.
Couple this with the wayward (and unexplained) behaviour of a character with whom (also in a somewhat unlikely way) she had had a shared childhood, and a flimsy attempt, made in the closing voice-over in the same connection, to cast doubt on the new presidential figure (how has he been appointed, since this film seems to overlook the convention that the vice-president takes over when something happens to the president?), and there is just such a mess that nothing redeemed it for me.