Salt - The Movie (Spoilers?)

The missus dragged me to this today, and i must say that, despite my reservations, it was a pretty fun afternoon. No great expectations on my part, so no great disappointments. It was basically a Bourne movie with a different lead. Good, fun popcorn movie.

But she does pretend to be a man at one point.

I just saw the movie and, I must say, I was unexpectedly entertained. Of course, I knew in the first five minutes that Liev Schreiber was going to end up being the bad guy.Angelina Jolie was actually good in this.

Not a great movie by a long shot, but definitely watchable, and not bad for a Summer movie, especially if you check any expectation of reality you may have at the door.

Without having read any of the thread or seen the film, and based solely on Liev Schreiber’s recent appearance on The Daily Show:

Does his character turn out to be the real spy? I got the impression he’d hinted at this accidentally, spoiling the film at least partly, though he tried to recover.

I will now read the tread and see if my guess is correct…

Yep, looks like.

They’re ALL spies.

In Salt II we learn that

Every single person in the U.S. is either a Soviet agent, a member of a terrorist sleeper cell, or an illegal immigrant drug smuggler.

I just saw it…I think this is the third or fourth film in the past year with car-surfing. Pathetic.

Finally a movie about the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that isn’t boring!

I don’t really think the criticisms against Salt regarding Evelyn Salt’s abilities are all that valid. Sure, it’s fun to criticize and I don’t mean to take away that pleasure, but I think a decent counter argument can be made. (At this point, I think open spoilers are warranted, because it says spoiler in the title and the movie has been out a while)

She survived and walked away from a car crash where airbags deployed. Lucky, sure. But hardly superhuman. The car dropped 20 feet onto other cars and crumple zone deformation will absorb most of the energy. The onramp from which the car jumped was exactly at roof-level with a one-story building so I’m estimating 20 feet and less if you subtract the height of the taxi they landed on.

She jumped from a helicopter into a cold river and swam to shore. She has skydiving experience on her resume. Some people have a superior resistance to cold. I saw a man survive an hour immersed in ice water on TV and people regularly swim in freezing lakes (i.e. Polar Bear plunge). So, if she has the right preparation and training, I think this is plausible. She was handcuffed, but there was a pretty long and loose chain on the cuffs.

She “surfed” on the roof of several trucks, leaping across moving traffic. Yes, this is a difficult and scary skill, but Agent Salt is a highly-trained operative who does not scare easily.

Thinking from the other side, how enjoyable would the movie be if we have out of shape protagonists of average to poor skill getting captured and killed in the first 5 minutes of the movie? We have to accept that Salt is an above-average human, like Batman, although not superhuman like Superman, Wolverine, or The Hulk.

In that case, I think with her extensive training, skill sets, and feats (i.e. advanced clothing pilfering from the Winona Ryder school of shoplifting), the movie is not outrageously implausible. I think even the disguise that got her into the White House was plausible.

Seriously? I’ve always wondered about movies where the opposite happens… it’s just not believable to me (must be a north/south thing)

I found this to be a pretty fun popcorn type flick, the only issue that I really had was that all they would have had to do to clear the whole thing up is ask the president what happened. He saw what’s his face kill everyone in the bunker and then take control of the nukes. They he pistol whipped the president. I’m just saying that might be a little factiod that would get out.