Salt shaker

You have to be old, or at least a casual student of Cold War days, to remember what the acronym S.A.L.T. stands for: it’s the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that began between Nixon and Brezhnev in the early ‘70s. The makers of Salt, the new Angelina Jolie pic, don’t so much remember the Cold War as wax nostalgic for it: it’s modern, post-9/11, cellphone-toting days, yet those evil Russkies are still trying to destroy decadent, freedom-loving Americans. (Cue Khrushchev waving shoe, yelling “We will bury you!”)

Then again, who would believe that real-life vampish Russian spy Anna Chapman would be caught and deported for helping run a spy ring while living in NYC, circa 2010? All good conspiracies eventually do make a comeback.

Salt, the new Phillip Noyce action flick, takes into account some modern nuances. There’s no more “Evil Empire,” just another deeply secretive government out there that’s still in the business of destabilization. But never mind the poli-sci lesson: Salt mostly rests on Angelina Jolie’s considerable physicality, her ability to convey shades of anxiety and emotional turmoil while, say, jamming a fresh magazine into a 9mm automatic pistol. 

That Angelina Jolie can play kick-ass heroines is well established. We’ve seen her in Lara Croft movies, in high-speed showcases like Wanted, in cutie-pie killer movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She looks great in tight outfits, hoisting large pistols, whipping her leg around to connect with a bad guy’s unsuspecting chin. And she does so with style.

Here she plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent on her way out the door to celebrate her honeymoon with German bug expert husband Michael (August Diehl) when Russian defector Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) shows up, wanting to confess some important information. It seems a certain Russian mole exists in the CIA, and is poised to assassinate the Russian president who is visiting the Big Apple to attend a state funeral. Before you can say “Boris Badenov,” Salt is on the run, trying to locate the mole and divert suspicion from herself. Or is it the other way around?

She has one ally, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), the only one who seems to believe Salt is innocent. But even his loyalty is tested as the script (by Kurt Wimmer and Brian Helgeland) twists and turns its way to a one-woman-against-the-world conclusion.

To tell much more would be spilling. But suffice it to say that, after 20 minutes of boring back story, Salt kicks into high gear and doesn’t look back. There are enough stunts

here to fill a Die Hard trilogy or a handful of Jason Bourne flicks. In fact, the Bourne films are a touchstone: memory and recovery are key to both heroes’ journeys, though in Salt’s case, it’s our — the audience’s — memory fog that’s being played upon. And Evelyn Salt’s toolkit is much more high-tech than Jason Bourne’s arsenal; instead of a few bare-arm neck twists, Salt has a handy utility pack that she fetches before fleeing headquarters (she is CIA-trained, after all).

Since we’re no longer in Cold War times, yet still playing those old Cold War moves in Salt, there are some concessions to topicality. Here, instead of an arms race, it’s the chessboard of international geopolitical intrigue: making a country look bad by stirring up their (current) foes — in this case, most of the Arab world. 

The action grows increasingly preposterous, reaching “Physics: Impossible” def-con levels at times. You stop noticing, wrapped up in the nonstop chase. One minute, Salt is leaping from an overpass bridge onto the roof of a passing 18-wheeler, the next she’s using a cop’s Taser to get him to keep steering a cop car while unconscious; at one turn she’s leaping into the Potomac River from a helicopter, at another she’s sliding down an elevator shaft with her bare hands without so much as breaking a fingernail.

Jolie doesn’t glam up much for the role. My wife commented that, even after giving birth to twins, she looks a bit anorexic. Maybe Angelina’s prototypical high-definition curves would have distracted us from focusing on the action, so she chose to play them down. Switching from blonde to long black wig to short pixie ‘do, she wears the bruises of her struggle, the sweat and the grime written on her face. But it’s a bit of a stretch to think she could wander around undetected near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, surrounded by clueless Secret Service agents and NYPD — I mean, come on: even with a long black wig, anyone could spot those lips a mile away.

At Comic-Con, Jolie said doing her own stunt work was key, and as the action scenes got harder, she found her character grew “meaner, harder and darker,” or at least her performance did. You might think Mama Jolie’s had enough of action films, but the Salt character apparently got to her: “She’s an interesting, damaged kind of person… People relate to her in a special kind of way.”

As in the best fugitive movies (such as, er, The Fugitive), it’s all about the is-she-or-isn’t-she-innocent protagonist avoiding capture at all costs. When such movies work, it’s because we glimpse, in a very human, non-CGI kind of way, what it’s like to suddenly be all alone in the world, a spy left out in the cold. It’s Jolie’s investment in the role that keeps us interested in where she’s heading, either way. Interestingly, the role was originally written for a male — offered to Tom Cruise, who reportedly passed on it. No matter: Jolie makes it her own. The posters for Salt carry the simple tagline: “Who is Salt?” It’s no giveaway to reveal this much: she’s one bad mother.