Angelina Jolie Pulls This Off!

Rating: 9/10 (31 March 2011)

I confess that I went into this with doubts about Angelina Jolie's ability to be believable in this role - but I have to admit that my doubts were wrong. She pulled off the role of Evelyn Salt absolutely perfectly. Evelyn was an American child raised in Russia after the death of her parents, who worked for the U.S. Embassy. Trained to be a Soviet agent, she was repatriated to the United States as part of a Soviet plot to bring the United States to its knees at an undefined future date, and eventually (and, yes, too conveniently, ends up as a CIA agent, exactly as the Soviets had planned for her). Apparently the demise of the Soviet Union didn't result in the demise of the plot, which is eventually put into action and leads to a movie that - in addition to the great performance by Jolie - has sustained excitement, a lot of tension, plot twists galore and a completely bewildering cast of characters, of whom you can never be sure which are the good guys and which are the bad guys. In short, you're guessing all the way through this and really you have no way of knowing exactly how this is going to end.
There are several truly unsettling moments scattered throughout this. Perhaps the two that stood out for me were the opening sequence in which Evelyn is tortured by the North Koreans after she's arrested as an American spy, and the scene in which Evelyn has to watch her husband die without being able to help him (and, indeed, having to pretend that she was completely unfeeling about it). The movie has some excellent action scenes scattered throughout. Yes, many of them are rather unbelievable (the scenes in which she jumps from truck to truck to truck to escape her CIA pursuers, and that where she takes over the police van stand out to me) - but that is, after all, the nature of the action genre. There's also a lot of pretty typical shootout action - which again means pretty unbelievable as Evelyn takes out pretty much everyone, but it's all well choreographed and truly exciting, and again it's the nature of the genre.
I don't know if there's a plan for a sequel, but the ending of the movie certainly sets us up for a potential sequel. I'd watch it. This was a truly enjoyable, exciting and unpredictable movie. (9/10)