Angelina Jolie spends most of Salt running, and the film is smart enough to keep up with her. Phillip Noyce directs the 2010 spy thriller from a script by Kurt Wimmer, with Brian Helgeland later reworking the lead for Jolie. The premise is a clean hook: CIA officer Evelyn Salt is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, and every move she makes to clear her name makes her look guiltier.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Defector Walks Into a Room
The accusation comes from Oleg Vasilyevich Orlov, played by Daniel Olbrychski. Salt interrogates him while her colleague Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and counterintelligence officer Darryl Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) watch. Orlov says that on “Day X,” Russian sleeper agents called “KAs” will destroy the United States, and that Agent “KA-12” will kill Russian President Boris Matveyev at the funeral of the U.S. vice president. Then he names KA-12: Evelyn Salt.
Peabody orders her detained. Orlov kills two agents and escapes. Salt escapes too, and the film turns into a chase across Washington, D.C., New York City, and Albany, New York, where Noyce shot on location between March and June 2009, with reshoots in January 2010.
That chase is the best thing in Salt. Noyce built the action around practical stunts, using computer-generated imagery mostly for digital environments rather than for the hits themselves. You can feel the difference. Jolie runs, jumps, drives and takes a beating, and the movie never cuts away from the cost of it.
The Spider in the Jar
Salt goes home for supplies. She takes weapons. She also takes a spider in a jar. Her husband, Mike Krause (August Diehl), is an arachnologist, and by then he has been kidnapped. The detail is small and strange and it lands, because the film has already told us who these two people are to each other.
The flashbacks fill in the rest. Salt was raised in the Soviet Union and trained with other children. She took the identity of the real Evelyn Salt, an American girl who died with her parents in a car crash in the Soviet Union. Orlov tests her loyalty by bringing Mike back, then having him killed in front of her. She does not react, and that convinces him.
It is the coldest scene in the picture, and Jolie plays it with almost nothing. The trouble is that the script asks the audience to accept a great deal at once. Orlov’s plan is elaborate, the timeline is thin, and the film keeps moving so fast that you rarely get a chance to ask whether any of it holds together. Reviewers at the time said the same thing: the plot was implausible and convoluted. They were right.
Jolie, Schreiber and Ejiofor
The cast is doing more work than the screenplay deserves.
- Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt
- Liev Schreiber as Theodore Winter
- Chiwetel Ejiofor as Darryl Peabody
- Daniel Olbrychski as Oleg Vasilyevich Orlov
- August Diehl as Mike Krause
Ejiofor gets the least to do. Peabody is the man chasing Salt, and the role is mostly procedural, but Ejiofor gives him a stubborn decency that keeps the pursuit from feeling like filler. Schreiber is better served. Winter is the one person in the room who might believe her, and Schreiber plays that doubt quietly, which matters later.
Jolie is the reason the film works at all. She had wanted a female spy franchise for years, and Columbia executive Amy Pascal suggested her to Noyce. Pascal had even invited Jolie to play a Bond girl. Jolie said she was more interested in playing James Bond herself. Salt is the closest she got, and she carries it.
The role was not written for her. Tom Cruise was initially secured for the lead, then spent more than a year in discussions with Noyce about playing Edwin A. Salt. Cruise decided he could not commit because he feared the character was too close to his Mission: Impossible character Ethan Hunt. He made Knight and Day instead. Noyce said Cruise had a point: “It was kind of returning to an offshoot of a character that he’d already played. It’s like playing the brother, or the cousin, of somebody that you played in another movie.”
What the Switch Cost and Bought
The gender change is the most interesting thing about Salt, and it is also where the film gets cautious.
Jolie asked for the third act to be reworked. In the original version, Salt rescued his wife and son from a coalition of villains. Jolie did not believe a mother would neglect her child in that situation, so Wimmer changed it. That is a real note from a real star, and it shaped the ending. It also means the film’s biggest set piece exists because its lead actress pushed back.
But Salt does not fully commit to what it is. It wants to be a franchise starter, and it ends by setting up more. The DVD and Blu-ray, released December 21, 2010, included two alternate cuts with different endings, which tells you the filmmakers were not certain which movie they had made.
Salt grossed $294 million worldwide and got generally positive reviews, with praise for the action and Jolie and criticism for the writing. It was nominated for Best Sound Mixing at the 83rd Academy Awards. A sequel never arrived.
The film is a good vehicle and a muddled story. The stunts hold up. The plot does not. Jolie makes you believe a woman could do all of this, and the script never quite makes you believe the reasons why.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
