- Location: Regal St. Louis Mills Stadium 18
- Salt is a taut, entertaining thriller that doesn't let the end of the Cold War get in the way of a good old-fashioned Russian spy story. The hero of the piece, Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), enters the film as a beaten-up North Korean P.O.W. whose obtrusively German husband (August Diehl) organizes her release. Fast forward a few years, and Salt is working for a "petroleum company" that bears a striking resemblance to the C.I.A. She and her colleague, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), are ready to head home for the day when a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) enters into their custody. Orlov spins an interesting yarn about a Soviet-era scheme to assassinate the U.S. president and throw the country into turmoil, but nobody's buying it. That is, until he mentions that the planned instrument of destruction is an agent named Evelyn Salt.
- Since they have little patience for that kind of talk at the C.I.A., Salt ends up in a locked room. But this is an action film, so surely you don't expect her to sit tight and wait for the facts of the situation to reveal themselves? As Orlov escapes custody by borrowing an old trick from Rosa Klebb, Salt makes a daring exit of her own. Now there are two suspected Russian spies on the loose, and they appear to be chasing each other. Actually, the chase scenes in this film are pretty exciting, with plenty of riding on the outsides of cars (before, in a sobering nod to reality, they get stuck in a D.C. traffic jam). Those childhood flashbacks certainly suggest that Salt knows more than she's letting on, but whose side is she really on?
- The answer to that question may depend on which part of the film you're watching, but the important thing is that Salt eventually decides to kick some serious Soviet butt. In that respect, Angelina Jolie proves to be exceptionally well cast as a secret agent every bit as tough as James Bond, even if she isn't quite as interesting as Jason Bourne. While the plot surrounding her occasionally borders on the absurd (hint to former Soviets: secret plots are generally more successful when they are kept secret), Salt has sense enough to let its excellent action sequences overwhelm any objections from those whom Hitchcock termed "The Implausibles." The result is a pretty decent way to spend 100 minutes on a post-glasnost Summer afternoon.
- In Cyrillic, SALT looks more like "CALM". Not really what the ad people were going for.
