Salt (2010)

• UK release: August 2010
• Director: Phillip Noyce  ·  Writer: Kurt Wimmer
• Studio / distributor: Columbia Pictures; Relativity Media; Di Bonaventura Pictures
• Genre: Espionage action thriller  ·  Runtime: 100 minutes (BBFC 12A)
• Main cast: Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mr & Mrs Smith) as Evelyn Salt; Liev Schreiber (Manchurian Candidate, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) as Ted Winter; Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men, American Gangster) as Peabody; Daniel Olbrychski (The Tin Drum) as Orlov
• IMDb: 6.5 / 10  ·  Rotten Tomatoes: 62% critics / 59% audience  ·  My rating: 8 / 10

The script for Salt was written for a man. Tom Cruise was attached, the lead was called Edwin, and then Cruise walked because the part looked too much like Ethan Hunt and the project went looking for a different star. Recasting it as Angelina Jolie is the smartest decision anyone makes here, because it turns a routine paranoid-spy premise into something with an edge: a glamorous, immovable star asked to spend a hundred minutes being unreadable. Phillip Noyce, who steered Harrison Ford through Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, knows exactly how to build a thriller around a face you cannot quite trust.

The setup

Evelyn Salt is a CIA officer with a clean record and a husband she loves. On the day she is meant to clock off early, a Russian defector walks into the building and calmly informs her colleagues that a deep-cover Soviet sleeper agent is about to assassinate the Russian president on American soil, and that the sleeper’s name is Evelyn Salt. From that accusation the floor drops away. Salt runs, ostensibly to reach her husband before the agency does, and every move she makes pushes her further from the version of herself the audience thought it had met. The pleasure, and the strain, is that the film keeps the question open: is she clearing her name, protecting someone, or carrying out the very mission she has been accused of?

That is a lot of plate-spinning, and Salt is not remotely interested in whether you believe any of it. It wants you to keep moving so you do not have time to object.

The cast

Jolie carries the thing almost single-handed, and she is the reason it works. She has the physical credibility the role demands, going back to Tomb Raider and sharpened in Mr & Mrs Smith, but the harder trick is the blankness. Salt has to be sympathetic and suspect in the same shot, and Jolie plays her as a sealed box, all competence and no tell. You read her by what she does, leaping between motorway lorries, improvising a weapon out of household chemistry, never by what she says.

Around her the casting is shrewd rather than showy. Liev Schreiber’s Ted Winter is the agency friend whose warmth you are invited to lean on, and Schreiber is good at making that warmth feel both genuine and provisional. Chiwetel Ejiofor brings real intelligence to Peabody, the counter-intelligence officer chasing her, so that the pursuit feels like a contest between two competent people rather than a dolt failing to catch a genius. Daniel Olbrychski’s Orlov, the defector who lights the fuse, carries a whole Cold War in his bearing, and the film is wise to let him.

The craft

Noyce makes a lean, propulsive picture. Robert Elswit, better known for the cool precision of his work with Paul Thomas Anderson, shoots the action so you can actually follow it, which by 2010 is no small thing. The set-pieces are practical and weighty: a stairwell fight, a freeway escape staged with a real sense of altitude and risk, a tense crawl through a barge. James Newton Howard’s score keeps the pulse up without drowning the quiet stretches. At a hundred minutes the film does not have an ounce of fat on it, and Noyce understands that the way to sell an outrageous twist is not to defend it but to be three scenes past it before you have finished frowning. The result is a thriller that respects your attention even as it cheerfully insults your credulity.

How it stacks up

The obvious reference point is the Bourne trilogy, and Salt borrows its handheld immediacy and its amnesiac-loyalty paranoia openly. It does not have Greengrass’s documentary nerve, but it is more fun, and it has a stranger engine: where Bourne is recovering a buried identity, Salt may be concealing one. It is closer in spirit to the sleeper-agent dread of The Manchurian Candidate, Cold War anxieties dusted off and pointed at a post-Soviet world. And it sits comfortably beside the Mission: Impossible films as glossy, star-led spycraft, with the welcome difference that the star here is a woman the camera takes entirely seriously as a physical threat. Female-fronted action of this scale and budget is rare enough that Salt feels like a small corrective, and Jolie has the presence to make the case stick.

Critics versus the rest of us

Critics are split down the middle, around 62%, and audiences a notch behind at 59%. The praise is for Jolie and for Noyce’s pacing; the complaints, almost without exception, are about a plot that does not bear a second’s scrutiny. Both are correct. The twists pile up past the point of plausibility, motivations rearrange themselves to suit the next reversal, and if you stop to map the conspiracy it falls apart in your hands. The mistake is stopping. This is a film engineered for momentum, and on its own terms the implausibility is a feature, the same destabilising trick that keeps Salt herself unreadable.

Verdict

I rate momentum, espionage and rewatchability highly, and Salt delivers all three. It is a brisk, confident, physically convincing thriller built around a star giving exactly the controlled, ambiguous performance the part needs, and it has the good sense to end with the door left open. The plot is daft and the film knows it; what it gets right is never giving you the breathing room to care. I will happily watch it again, which for this kind of picture is most of the battle. ⁸⁄₁₀.

Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. One to catch on the big screen for the set-pieces, then again on Blu-ray for the freeway sequence.

Update

Added since this review first appeared: a sequel was discussed for years on the strength of that open ending but never materialised, and Salt has settled into its reputation as a sharp one-off and a landmark for female-led action, a line that runs on through Atomic Blonde (2017) and Jolie’s own later thrillers. The director’s cut and the alternate-ending version, both circulated on home release, push Salt’s loyalties in slightly different directions and are worth seeking out. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on your region.

BBFC content advice

Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence and one use of strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.

Violence: There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, including gunfights and fistfights, and a scene of torture in which it is implied that a plastic tube is forced into a woman’s mouth and filled with water.

Language: Infrequent use of strong language occurs (‘f**k’).

Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).