Salt is an action thriller starring Angelina Jolie. The writer, Kurt Wimmer, has a number of film credits, including co-writing the remake of that notable 60s film The Thomas Crown Affair, while the director, Philip Noyce, has directed such films as Dead Calm and The Bone Collector. So a strong team was involved.
The film begins with scenes in North Korea. Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is suspected of spying and after she is given some rough treatment the CIA arranges a prisoner exchange to secure her release. She is reunited with her boyfriend Mike, who has been campaigning on her behalf. He proposes marriage even though she admits to him that she is indeed a CIA operative.
After this preamble, we get into the meat of the story. Salt is interrogating a Russian defector called Orlov together with a couple of her colleagues. Orlov claims to have knowledge of a plan for Russian sleeper agents to attack the US; part of the scheme involves one of those agents assassinating the Russian president. And then he reveals the name of that agent...which is Evelyn Salt.
This is in many ways an update of the 'who can you trust?' Cold War movies of the 60s and 70s, and it has itself in some respects been superseded by more recent political developments. Angelina Jolie's charismatic screen presence makes the film watchable enough, but I felt that some of the action scenes verged on the cartoonish and that it became increasingly difficult to care whose side Evelyn Salt was really on. Not a bad film, but as far as I was concerned, a bit of a disappointment.
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