On paper Salt sounds like an interesting film prospect; a spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetal Ejiofor, all excellent actors who tend to pick good projects to work on, under the steady hands of Australian director Phillip Noyce (The Quiet American, Dead Calm). In the current climate of Islamic fundamentalist baddies, it is also a nice change to see a return of Communist Russians, determined to tear down the fabric of American society. Unfortunately the experience of watching Salt doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s not a bad film, it is even worse- it’s a boring film. This is a story of espionage that completely forgot to include any of the required intrigue and excitement – basically a thrill-less thriller.
Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent in the Russian department and apart from an unpleasant incident in North Korea, Salt seems to have a normal-ish life with her arachnologist husband. That is until a Russian defector names her as a long-time embedded Russian spy and through some rather inexplicable plotting she goes on the run, with her CIA boss (Schreiber) and Counter-Intelligence officer, Peabody (Ejiofor) on her tail.
Columbia Pictures must have been rubbing their hands with glee when the story broke earlier this year about the arrest of numerous Russian sleeper spies living in the US. The timing for Salt, which uses a similar set of circumstances as the basis for the film, is incredible. A piece of good luck, an insightful piece of scriptwriting or the most elaborate piece of film marketing ever (I’m not seriously suggesting Columbia Pictures embedded Russian spies in America just to increase the box office takings)- the coincidence probably suggests to potential film-goers that this film is a tapped on political thriller. It isn’t.
And what’s worse is the amount of talent squandered. The combination of an awful script (from Kurt Wimmer, Law Abiding Citizen) and lacklustre directing completely saps the life out of the film’s three stars. It is a hard task to make Schreiber (Definance) and Ejiofor (Serenity) completely uninteresting, yet somehow Noyce has managed it here. Jolie, who worked with Noyce on 1999’s The Bone Collector, is robotic in her performance and lacks any sense of being fallible, making her character rather inaccessible to audiences.
You can forgive the film’s ridiculous plotting- this is a genre reliant on certain breaks from reality and disassociates itself from the realms of what is humanly possible. But while there are a few good action sequences, these aren’t enough to combat the film’s monotonal performances and ultimately the film fails to generate any sense of exhiliration or charm- which is what you want and expect from a spy thriller. Salt had the potential to ignite and excite, sadly in the end it just fizzles.
Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent in the Russian department and apart from an unpleasant incident in North Korea, Salt seems to have a normal-ish life with her arachnologist husband. That is until a Russian defector names her as a long-time embedded Russian spy and through some rather inexplicable plotting she goes on the run, with her CIA boss (Schreiber) and Counter-Intelligence officer, Peabody (Ejiofor) on her tail.
Columbia Pictures must have been rubbing their hands with glee when the story broke earlier this year about the arrest of numerous Russian sleeper spies living in the US. The timing for Salt, which uses a similar set of circumstances as the basis for the film, is incredible. A piece of good luck, an insightful piece of scriptwriting or the most elaborate piece of film marketing ever (I’m not seriously suggesting Columbia Pictures embedded Russian spies in America just to increase the box office takings)- the coincidence probably suggests to potential film-goers that this film is a tapped on political thriller. It isn’t.
And what’s worse is the amount of talent squandered. The combination of an awful script (from Kurt Wimmer, Law Abiding Citizen) and lacklustre directing completely saps the life out of the film’s three stars. It is a hard task to make Schreiber (Definance) and Ejiofor (Serenity) completely uninteresting, yet somehow Noyce has managed it here. Jolie, who worked with Noyce on 1999’s The Bone Collector, is robotic in her performance and lacks any sense of being fallible, making her character rather inaccessible to audiences.
You can forgive the film’s ridiculous plotting- this is a genre reliant on certain breaks from reality and disassociates itself from the realms of what is humanly possible. But while there are a few good action sequences, these aren’t enough to combat the film’s monotonal performances and ultimately the film fails to generate any sense of exhiliration or charm- which is what you want and expect from a spy thriller. Salt had the potential to ignite and excite, sadly in the end it just fizzles.
First published on Trespass
