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Salt

A better than average action-thriller.

The end

The movie did a good job with things like exposition and dialogue (not saying what’s unnecessary), yet completely lost it at the very end. In the helicopter with a handcuffed Angelina Jolie, she and the black agent suddenly went into great detail discussing her status and the shocking events that brought them to that point. The problem is that the agent and we the audience already knew everything! Salt spared his life earlier, only hurt and did not kill any Americans (except Liev Schreiber at the end), the Russian President was not killed, and Salt’s fingerprints were found at the place with the dozen dead Russians. Oh, and the American President did not die so it was safe to assume he would have remembered that the Schreiber character was a Russian secret agent.

Because of the above, it was also unnecessary and foolish for the agent in the chopper to say he believed Salt, but no one else would. All this was done to setup a sequel and what the filmmakers thought was a cool ending of Salt jumping into the Potomac. The proper ending should have been more upbeat and simple like The Fugitive, where Salt would have finally been recognized and respected for being innocent and a hero.

Structure / Plot

I’m not sure what the point was in the Russian mastermind waltzing into the CIA building and explaining the story. If it was all to let the sleeper agents know that the plan had commenced, then that made no sense since the agents would have needed more time to plan such an assassination. Then outing Salt made her “job” much harder because of course her colleagues were going to detain her! And the mastermind did all that with the expectation that he would escape from the building? The backstory could have been revelaed in another way and the agents could have been notified in another way. This silliness was out of place in a flick that otherwise took its realism seriously.

Similar to the above- in the second half of Act II, it was established that another agent aside from Salt was on the job to make sure that it got done. This would have been good to know earlier in Act II in relation to the attack on the Russian President. It sure seemed that the global disaster could have easily been avoided had Salt simply not attacked him!

That she did it to save her husband was weak and not clear at that point. Besides, it would have taken a lesser effort on her part to bypass the attack and try to rescue her husband, aside from the idea of not risking billions of lives. Hmm, the logic of the movie is getting weaker and not holding up the standard of the Jason Bourne flicks…

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