Salt
(Director’s Cut)
(2010)
(SPOILERS) Not so many years back, if you wanted a kickass female
action hero, you called popular alleged Illuminati Satanist Angelina Jolie’s
agent before Charlize Theron’s. She was Lara Croft – the big screen original,
for what that’s worth (not much) – met Brad Pitt while trying to shoot him up,
and tutored James McAvoy in the ways of the super assassin. Salt was the last such vehicle she headlined
and seems to have received its share of invective over the years, but it’s one
I rather liked, a ludicrously pulpy spy thriller – whatever surface comparisons
were made with sleeper poster girl Anna Chapman were just that – that refused
to stint on, relished even, its absurd developments and proceeded to its
destination at a breakneck pace. Having heard the Director’s Cut improved on a few things, I thought I’d give it a
look.
I’m not sure it does, really. It’s about the same all in
all, but with a twist ending that invokes, of all movies, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra (it is
a decent twist, to be fair), as it’s implied the new US President is another
sleeper agent (the picture was already in danger of reaching Murder on the Orient Express levels of
having virtually everyone in
positions of power in on it). Ironically, this seems exactly the sort of cliffhanger
you’d expect franchise-minded studio heads to favour, yet they wet with the much
less intriguing open one in the theatrical cut, simply having Salt leap out of a
helicopter, with Chiwetel Eijofor’s permission, in order to track down
remaining KA-12 agents; they also opted for it over the more final Extended Edition in which, rather than
killing Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), on the barge prior to the climactic
sequence, she does so after escaping, blowing up the sleeper training facility
to boot. Which is all a bit too neat and pat.
I well recall the movie’s sometime development hell, with it
initially announced as a Tom Cruise vehicle under the title Edwin A Salt about three years before it
eventually got made and released (Cruise ultimately opted out because he felt Salt
was too close to Ethan Hunt – which didn’t stop him from making Knight and Day instead). Kurt Wimmer
penned the screenplay, one of his better post-Equilibrium forays, which include dire remakes (Total Recall and Point Break) and hacky genre vehicles (Street Kings, Law Abiding
Citizen). He reportedly had his draft for Salt 2 nixed by Jolie back in 2012, but if there’s little chance of
it being revived with its original star, never fear, as Sony has a TV version
planned.
Philip Noyce, a director as comfortable making smaller, more
politicised pictures (Rabbit Proof Fence,
The Quiet American) as journeyman
Hollywood blockbusters, had previously worked with Jolie on the execrable The Bone Collector, and does a more than
presentable job here. The key to Salt’s
success is ensuring it maintains such a pace that you don’t have sufficient
time to debate its debatable plot progressions, almost all of which require
incredibly unlikely circumstances to align at precise intersections in order to
play out as they do. Noyce succeeds admirably, and the picture comes in at such
a tidy length (still just 104 minutes in the longer Director’s Cut) that you’d assume, in the current age of bloat, it
had been hacked to pieces by the studio (there were reshoots, but the studio was quite confident about the $110m
budget picture, which went on to make almost $300m worldwide).
It might have been more interesting if Salt had no qualms
about being a Russian sleeper and was all for carrying out her mission (certainly,
her wet blanket arachnologist husband (August Diehl) does nothing to convince us
she’d switch allegiances for love). Or even more so if the Director’s Cut had Liev Schreiber’s also-sleeper agent and CIA
colleague Ted Winter besting her (I know, that was never going to happen). Or
he’d been the focus of the plot (Schreiber had already played a sleeper in
Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate
remake half a decade earlier), since Schreiber has a tendency to seemingly
effortlessly wrestle attention from his lead co-star any time he’s in anything,
and Salt is no exception. The most fun
to be had in the movie is when he reveals his true status and promptly goes
kill crazy on a room filled with presidential staff. And President.
One might argue the McGuffin objective of the plot (aiming
nuclear missiles at Mecca and Tehran so as to “enrage two billion Muslins”) is rather redundant, since the US has
achieved that objective with no outside interference, but this is Hollywood
fantasy, logic being entirely by the by. Jolie’s expectedly impassive in the
lead, which suits the performance, although her thrashing about with those
stick-thin arms and legs in action scenes takes a bit of getting used to. On
the Ethan Hunt comparison front, at one point she dons prosthetics to infiltrate
the White House that leave her looking surprisingly(?) like her brother. Ejiofor
provides solid support in a thankless role, Andre Braugher is blink and you’ll
miss him, while Corey Stoll shows us he didn’t have any hair long before he was
getting lead roles. Salt’s good fun,
despite the naysayers, and you could do worse than take in a double bill of
this and Atomic Blonde. Which cut,
though? There isn’t much in it, but I’d avoid the Extended.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.