Salt

Director: Phillip Noyce
Writers: Kurt Wimmer, Brian Helgeland
Starring: Angelina Jolie
Release Date: July 23, 2010
Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Angelina Jolie is a fantastic Academy Award winning actress, with films such as Girl Interrupted and Changeling in her career. However she continues to lessen her reputation as an incredible actress each time she comes out with a stupid action movie. Obviously it’s good for an actor to have a variety of films in their career, but if not for all these shoot ‘em up movies, Jolie might be known as one Hollywood’s most talented actresses. That being said, this isn’t the worst of Jolie’s films, in fact it’s almost enjoyable. Jolie is Evelyn Salt, an undercover CIA agent, who has a cover life with a husband and job to hide what she really does. While Salt is interrogating a Russian defector, he accuses her of being a Russian spy and says she will assassinate the Russian president in a few days. Shocked by this accusation, Salt ends the interrogation and leaves the building. Although her co-workers believe her at first, Salt escapes quite quickly and radically out of the building and to her home. We think this is because she is afraid of being caught and taken to prison, however as the film progresses, the audience is forced to question Salt’s true identity. I Surprisingly only have one problem with Salt. Just one. About 3 quarters of the way through the film or maybe even a bit before, I thought the film was finished and should have ended there. If this were the ending, it would have let us hanging and lead to a sequel. Instead, the film itself included a sequel. Right when I thought the problem was solved…Oh, wait, there’s another problem we are going to deal with for no reason whatsoever. If the film had ended where it should have, I would be giving it a generally good review right now. I quite enjoyed the first half and thought it was a lot of fun. The second half though, just kept on getting more and more ridiculous and unfortunately lead me to dislike this movie. I didn’t have high expectations of this film to begin with, so my expectations were raised and then lowered again. I can’t even judge anyone’s performances in this film because I couldn’t pay attention to them, when I was wondering why this film was still going. Salt could have been a great idea for two fun, exciting action movies, but was quickly ruined when two ideas formed one never ending movie. I hope to see Jolie in a better film soon. For now, I think you can understand by now that I do not recommend this movie.