Who is Salt?

Rating: 6/10 (25 August 2010)

When Salt was first commissioned it was seen as a project for Tom Cruise but he rejected it seeing it as being too similar to the Mission Impossible Series. But Angelina Jolie heard about the project she saw it chance to start a female spy franchise.
Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA officer plays on moving out of field work for the sake of her marriage. Yet her plans are destroyed when a Russian defector, Vassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) accuses her of being a Russian Sleeper agent assigned to kill the Russian President. He claims Salt has been trained to since she was a child. With Counter-Intelligence Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and her boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) wanting her for questioning Salt has to go on the run and raises the question: who is Salt? 2010's summer season has been pretty lacklustre, with only Inception and Toy Story 3 truly impressing and Iron Man 2 being entertaining. Salt is more like The A-Team, its decent but nothing special. It is however better then Knight and Day. Jolie is convincing is a top spy, showing she can really kick ass. I love that she was a very resource character and a little like Sydney Bristow from Alias. SPOILER ALERT: However despite the flashbacks there is no reason given to why Salt turned against her Russian masters SPOILER ALERT OVER. She is ably supported by Schreiber and Ejiofor, both very good actors but they do offer a standard performance, with Schreiber fairly a little better. There are far from bad but there had little to work on.
The director of the piece was Philip Noyce, an old fashion style director who has form for spy thrillers in the form of the best two Tom Clancy adaptations and The Saint. He can direct an action scene and it was refreshing for the most part that he only uses CGI when he has to. Jolie looks great when she is fighting, even if there a little over edited. He also keeps the film at a first pace, allowing the film to be pretty entertaining. But many of the action sequence didn't feel as a consequence or real as the new Bond films or the Bourne series, which gave though two series there edge.
Kurt Wimmer did write some interesting ideas involving Russian sleepers which was very timely considering events on the East Coast of America in 2010. There was a decent element idea of a rogue ex-KGB agent awaking sleepers for his own reasons, but other elements were bit over the top and ridiculous. Luckily Noyce doesn't slow down to allow us to think about them for too long. Yet they could and should have been tighter and the way the film ends make a sequel very difficult to work. I was also able to guess the big plot twist very early on.
Overall a decent enough action film but there is no need for a sequel.