Salt (2010) Review: Salty, Tasty Goodness

If there is one thing you can learn from Salt is that Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is a freakin’ kleptomaniac! How many outfits does one highly-skilled CIA operative need to steal? Don’t you have any morals?! Oh wait, Salt’s a highly skilled CIA operative- of course she doesn’t have morals.

In Salt, everything’s going fine for our salty-ass hero …until a Russian man (Daniel Olbrychski) shows up at her work and accuses her of being a Russian spy in front of her partner Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and all her coworkers. Um, hello? Can we get HR on the phone please, this is workplace harassment. While her confused coworkers try to sort out her loyalties, Salt takes herself a nice little impromptu vacation.

When Salt hit the scene in 2010, having a kickass female lead was relatively rare. Thankfully, we live in the enlightened future… where it’s still relatively rare. This Action Chick craves more representation! I love seeing the fellas smack the baddies around, too, but hot damn is it refreshing to see an awesomely-skilled, super-smart heroine kicking ass and taking names.

Salt (the movie) keeps the action at a consistent clip, mostly with chase scenes featuring Michael Bay-style spinning cams and thankfully bereft of Bourne-style shaky cam. Salt (the character) is like a brutal Jackie Chan, wielding the tiniest mundane implements to kick ass and give her pursuers the slip.

We also see an extremely rare trope in play: the reverse-fridging, wherein a male character is killed for the sole purpose of giving the female lead increased motivation. What should we call that? A microwaving? Maybe backyard grilling? Hmm…

Anyway, the reverse-fridging (new name patent pending) is probably an artifact of this story originally being written for a male lead. When Angelina Jolie came on board very few things were changed, basically just her gender and the gender of her tragically doomed love interest. 

Taking in nearly 300 million at the box office, Salt was a huge hit in its day. This film is fast, lean, and clean. I’m honestly perplexed as to why we didn’t see a series spring out of this- we can get a zillion Taken and Equalizer movies, why not more Salt? Where’s Salt 2: Salt & Pepper, or Salt 3: Salt V Paprika Dawn of Spices? This classic Angelina Jolie action film deserves to be on more people’s radars, and I aim to rectify that. Find it and watch it! It’s great!

Time until real action starts: ~ 17 minutes

Baddies: Russians!

Best Kill: Salt has been taken into custody with her hands cuffed behind her back. She is being escorted past Winter (Liev Schrieber) who is stealthily grabbing a pair of scissors to shank her with. Salt gets a fearsome look in her eye and lets the chains between her cuffs fall loose. As Winter lunges for her, she jumps on him, wraps the chain around his neck and jumps off the balcony behind him. She pins him in place with her body-weight hanging there, performing a reverse-hangman maneuver! Oh yeah! He died! Hard!

Best Explosion: A Russian spy is undercover as a White House employee. He says, “I’m going home.” and then BOOM! He blows himself up in the White House. The explosion starts around his middle so that you can almost see his insides… but sadly it’s PG-13 so it doesn’t get that gross.

Action Rating: 3 ½ Secret Agent Salts, out of 5.

This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!

Disclaimer: Just because I am the Action Flick Chick and love action movies does not mean I condone real life violence in any way. Everyone has their own shit to deal with, be nice to each other.