
Jolie is Evelyn Salt, married to a German (August Diehl) who tends to poisonous spiders, which is obviously foreshadowing something (ah, but what?), a C.I.A agent who, 26 minutes before her wedding anniversary, if forced to interrogate a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) who advises a Russian super duper sleeper spy is set to assassinate the Russian President when he visits the U.S. in a few days time for the Vice President's funeral. The super duper sleeper spy's name? "Evelyn Salt," he says. "That's my name," says Evelyn Salt. Uh oh.
Naturally two high ranking C.I.A. officials, Winter (Liev Schrieber) and Peabody(Chiwetel Ejiofor), want to question Salt. So they put her in an interrogation room - yeah, like Evelyn Salt's gonna stay in there - at which point the film unleashes 30 minutes or so of such flabbergastingly fantastic action it might very well leave you exhausted before the film is even half over.

Oh, there are twists and turns aplenty still to come and not only is there an assassination attempt on the Russian President but also an assassination attempt on the U.S. President and potential nuclear annihiliation. Yet despite so much content Noyce and his writer Kurt Wimmer manage what most of their contemporaries cannot and hold the proceedings in well under two hours and they do it by ignoring extranaeous fluff and keeping the throttle down. They provide just enough exposition to give us our bearings and then go, go, go! The film's only flaw - and it's not really flaw so much as the persnickety problem that prevents it from achieving perfection - is an overlong third act, particularly a Talking Killer Scene that easily could have been condensed to three or four sentences and one important television image with a little screenwriting craft. Alas. It rebounds, anyway, with a perfect end because it knows precisely when to end.
"The Expendables", written and directed by and starring Sylvester Stallone, and starring just about every other male action star you can think of, is set for release in a couple weeks, except now it could not be any more anti-climactic. This is because if Angelina Jolie yearns in any way to rule the action genre then it will be hers and hers alone.
2 comments:
Damn it, Prigge, I thought this movie was about protests against the British government in India. Now you've taken all the fun out of my three movies per year. Spoiler, indeed.
I told you! You can't get mad at me if if I ISSUED a spoiler alert.
Also, this movie is like one giant spoiler alert. Every 12 seconds there is another spoiler. I mentioned approximately 17 spoilers so you still have another 142 to go. You'll be fine.
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