By Teresa R. Tunay, OCDS
* Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alex Pettyfer, Gaius Charles, Victor Slezak, Marion McCorry, Jonah Keyes
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
* Running Time: 99 min.
* Director: Phillip Noyce
* Writer: Kurt Wimmer, Brian Helgeland
Salt is a curious amalgam of James Bond, Bourne Identity, McGyver and Spiderman—and because the lead character is a woman, anything the guys can do she can do better.
Salt opens with with a near naked Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) being tortured in a North Korean dungeon to talk, but all she says, in tears, is “I am not a spy…” Actually she’s really a spy, one of CIA’s toughest and brightest A colleague, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) fetches her out of captivity, saying Salt owes her freedom to her admirer Mike (August Diehl), a German scientist whose forte is arachnid research and who soon after becomes her husband.
The chase begins when a Russian defector, Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), who at interrogation pins down Salt as a KGB agent in deep cover whose mission is to assassinate Russian president Matyveyev (Olek Krupa), currently in the United States to attend the funeral of the American vice-president. The lie detector test registers truth in everything Orlov claims, leading Salt’s other colleague, Agent Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to believe Salt is really a Russian spy. Ted doesn’t believe it, however, but joins Peabody in the hunt for the elusive Salt whose main concern now is to reach her husband while evading pursuers.
Salt is one thriller you can see three times and not tire of. Jolie as the action star is at her elusive best, reportedly doing 95 percent of her stunts and exuding mystique that combines toughness and fragility. If you’ve ever seen one of those gold-plated real orchids from Singapore, you’ll know what Salt’s persona is in this film.
Originally meant for Tom Cruise (as Edwin Salt), this action masterpiece would have been generic, but because the role went to a woman, and the intriguing Angelina Jolie at that, the movie Salt took on a spicier flavor. We agree with one American film critic who says Jolie is a fine-looking woman whose lips, eyes, profile, nose, boobs, butt and indeed the whole of her enigmatic beauty has been celebrated on celluloid, but this time, Salt celebrates her ankles.
She jumps from one moving truck to another, traverses a high rise window ledge with bare hands and feet, rolls off a flyover and lands on a moving van, and descends an elevator shaft by just jumping from level to lower level—doing all those and more, the character could have died from a fractured skull, internal hemorrhage or a snapped spine, but here Salt survives without as much as spraining an ankle. Indeed, much like a grain of salt on a free fall from the shaker but defies the laws of physics and manages to escape the frying pan. (Boy, that can only happen in the cartoons!)
Salt is a curious amalgam of James Bond, Bourne Identity, McGyver and Spiderman—and because the lead is a woman, anything the guys can do she can do better. Makes you wonder if real life spies can be that good or indestructible but you don’t care for answers and instead go along with the chase because it’s advancing the story, and a good story to boot. The story is really about sleeper spies in the US, orphans trained from childhood by the Russians, to one day patriotically wreak havoc on American society and then the whole world. Evelyn Salt is supposed to be one of those orphans.
Viewers of Salt are enjoined to look beyond all the media sizzle generated by Jolie’s exceptional stunts and dive deeper into Evelyn Salt’s conflicted character. Without second thoughts and second glances she kills everyone who gets in her way but risks life and limb to save the life of her pet puppy. Aware that as a spy she can’t offer a future to the man who offers her marriage, she believes in love and marries him anyway. Brainwashed from age 12 to believe in the nobility of her murderous mission, she grows up as the compleat spy, and yet look what happens when everything is taken away from her.
If there is one very important thing Salt is leading us to examine, it is how we adults have come to regard our children. Salt may not be consciously doing it but it’s making us see what happens when children are used as pawns in vicious adult games, when their native intelligence is hewn to serve inhuman purposes, and when their innocence is sacrificed at the altar of ideology.
It’s adults with warped values who lead children into the dark to suite their destructive schemes, in the process destroying their souls. In Salt, the setting is espionage; in real life, the stakes are higher. Mothers push their children into prostitution and mendicancy. Fathers lure their daughters into incest. Governments and schools inculcate in children the culture of death attractively veneered as “reproductive health”. In Salt, orphans are programmed like dogs to kill for their masters’ own shining goal, and yet, can all the evil in the world really kill the human spirit? You might find the answer in Salt.
CINEMA RATING: Technical: 3.5 Moral: 3 R 14
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