I admit that I slept through the middle two-thirds of this film, so take this review with a grain of salt. I can say, though, that the opening 20 minutes were so bland, and the ending was so formulaic, that I can easily infer all that happened during my nap. I generally think of action movies as nothing more than star vehicles, with little originality or artistic vision. This one stars an actress I’ve never even heard of, which makes it a complete failure by genre standards. When I learned that this Angelina Jolie is the wife of super-hunk Brad Pitt, I was even more frustrated by the possibilities that this film ignored. If you want to have a female spy, why not just put Brad Pitt in drag? Or, if the movie gods insist on launching Jolie’s career, why not do a picture which stars both her AND her much more talented husband? How about a picture where they play a married couple of spies, and neither knows that the other is a spy, and they are asked by their respective agencies to kill each other? Perhaps Hollywood thinks that such a complex plot would be too confusing for the typical American audience. Perhaps Hollywood is concerned that, during the making of such a movie, Brad Pitt might cheat on Angelina Jolie with Jennifer Aniston or something. Whatever Hollywood’s motivation, the film that COULD HAVE BEEN is much better than the film they decided to make.
The opening act of the film, which I did not sleep through, is one of those scenes which tells you all you need to know about the main character. We learn that she got the name “Salt” during her first week at Spy Camp, when the class clown decided to unscrew the salt cap so that way too much salt poured onto Salt’s spaghetti. More importantly, we see that right away, Salt is the top kick-boxer in her class, but that she also has a weakness which will be exploited by the villain in the final act. The absurdity of this weakness provides pretty much the only bit of entertainment in the entire movie. Salt’s Achilles’s Heal is getting pepper in the eyes. Now, nobody likes getting pepper in the eyes, but when it happens to Salt, she immediately evacuates her bowels and collapses into a quivering heap on the floor. It is not difficult for the villain to figure out a way to make this work for him. In the end, though, Salt manages to overcome her weakness and save the world. What she does with her soiled leather pants is foul enough to make even John Waters sick. Actually, Mr. Waters might want to keep this Angelina Jolie in mind for his next twisted tale of depravity. Her high-profile marriage to a movie star will not be enough to maintain her doomed career, and this makes her perfect to follow in the footsteps of other self-parodying pop-culture has-beens that end up in John Waters movies.
