Superspy Jolie on the run.
|
|
To prove you're worth your salt as an international spy (thriller-movie division), all you have to do is: create a stink-bomb bazooka out of ordinary office fixtures; walk barefoot out of a locked-down CIA office where a platoon of feds has you cornered; use window-ledge terpsichore to escape from your high-rise apartment (with a backpack full of artillery, disguises and your spouse's poisonous spider); blast your manacled way out of a police car using a Taser; jump off a highway bridge onto the top of a speeding semi, then onto another truck in the next lane; wear disguises that involve changing your hair color and, at least once, your sex; and all the while, look faaabulous.
A male action drama can be handed to any guy who looks fit enough to do a chin-up. (I mean, honestly: Ashton Kutcher in Killers?) The female action genre: that's pretty much Angelina Jolie. With her slim, voluptuous body, her Easter Island-idol facial features and that smoldering I-dare-you look, Jolie is one of the few contemporary star actresses who doesn't seem locked in perpetual girlhood; she was born grown up, sure of herself and ready to rumble. That makes her perfect for ballsy ladies like tomb raider Lara Croft, the assassin in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (targeting her real-life beau Brad Pitt), the daredevil pilot in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the seductive witch-goddess of Beowulf and a secret-society supervixen -- the definitive Jolie character -- in Wanted. She's got what no other Hollywood woman even tries for, and which is embodied among recent international stars perhaps only by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh: feminismo.
In Salt, her new medium-fun espionage caper, A. Jo takes a role originally written for Tom Cruise -- he chose to make the jokier Knight and Day instead -- and manages to ratchet up the testosterone level. She's Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who's endured torture by the North Koreans without blowing her cover. Two years later, happily married to an arachnologist who doesn't know what she does for a living, Evelyn is fingered as a double agent by a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski). Cue the dragnet, the frenetic chases and the pounding James Newton Howard score. Salt spends the rest of the movie on the run from her friendly boss (Liev Schreiber), a relentless G-man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and nearly every federal, state and city cop in the Northeast corridor. And because in a spy movie the hero needs to be pursued by outlaws as well as lawmen, Evelyn also has to watch out for a nest of Slavic superkillers bred in the Soviet Union and planted in the U.S. to carry out an assassination plot targeting two world leaders.
Click here to continue reading.
