Salt is a spy movie on the wrong side of ridiculousness. It doesn’t realize it’s a joke. The movie takes itself too seriously and is set in too realistic of a world to also have Angelina Jolie scaling a high-rise with her pet dog in her backpack. Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is a grim CIA operative who is accused by a Russian defector of being a sleeper agent, a mole planted way back during the Cold War era who is on the verge of being “activated.” When her colleagues – including Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor – begin to believe the defector, she runs, setting the picture’s feature-length chase in motion. Director Phillip Noyce stages one nice action scene, a multi-leveled highway escape in which Salt bounces from truck to truck like one of those barrels in the old Donkey Kong video game. The rest, however, is laughable, including Jolie’s “disguises.” To sneak into a funeral, where her pursuers await, she dyes her hair black but doesn’t alter the style one bit. A friend noted that this sort of trickery works for Clark Kent, but Salt aims to be a bit more sophisticated.
