Salt: What Bourne can do, Jolie can do better

Elvis D'Silva reviews Salt.

A man walks into a building and tells security that he is a Russian spy... sounds like the beginning of a joke doesn't it?

Angelina Jolie and the rest of the people responsible for the movie Salt will be hoping that millions of people take the movie seriously enough to buy tickets and go watch what I imagine Team Jolie is hoping will become a major action franchise.

Towards that end, the multi-wigged mother of six (in real life, not in the movie) plays a run-and-gun secret agent who attempts to elude various law enforcement agencies after a Russian spy names her as the sleeper agent who will kill the visiting Russian President on US soil.

Really that is all the plot information you need to decide whether you want to watch this film or not. Because what this movie really is is an exercise in proving that anything Jason Bourne can do, Evelyn Salt can do better.

So decked out in a series of questionable hair pieces -- that includes a bizarre Michael Jackson (circa his Lisa Marie Presley wedding) hairdo -- the central character goes on the run while trying to prove that she is being framed.

In the early parts of this movie one is tempted to worry that the painfully thin-looking leading lady's bones might actually break upon impact during one of the many chases she endures and survives.

When things start getting progressively hairier though, one begins to wonder how much more damage a feral character like herself might have inflicted if she had any more meat on her bones.

Make no mistake; Evelyn Salt is one cold-blooded badass. She leaps off high structures onto moving vehicles, indulges in petty theft, sleight-of-hand subterfuge, punches the living hell out of men easily twice her size and fires all manner of weapons as if she really knows how to handle them. You wouldn't want to meet a woman like this in a cold dark alley.

The action is definitely more kinetic and conducive to suspending disbelief than the atrocities committed in Knight and Day.

Though one is tempted to think that Ms. Jolie's days of looking her best are well past, there is no denying that she is one of the very few working actresses (Milla Jovovich is another) who can essay a role like this and not make it seem ridiculous.

If you're in the mood for an action spectacle that rarely ever lets up and is very content to blow up, kick down or punch out every thing that stands in its way, Salt might be an amusing little diversion for you.

For the rest, I suppose there is always another attempt at making sense of Inception.

Rediff Rating: