Lightning A-Salt

Our day care does 'Parents Night Out' once a month or so, and tonight was the night. We went out to see Salt; I'm not sure, but it might be the first time I've seen a movie on opening night. I've done opening day matinees maybe a dozen times, but it might be the first night.

In any event, it was a weird movie. Cohesion just wasn't there. The story didn't flow, they jumped from place to place... It just wasn't very good.

Close to the beginning, she's at the Rink Oil building (I didn't notice any of the surrounding buildings), but it was supposed to be a CIA front. Just as she's about to leave, she and a co-worker are called back in to interview a suspicious person. They do so; at the end, as shown in commercials, she's called a double-agent. She escapes the building after quite a bit of work (incidentally, at one point she pulls her panties off, and puts them over a security camera. I wonder what they would have done if Tom Cruise (originally slated for the lead) had remained in the cast), and is shown leaving the Hoover Building. Leaving aside that she hadn't started there, the CIA does not work within the FBI's headquarters.

She gets back to her apartment via taxi before the CIA can get there. That, in itself, is a little bit odd. Her directions to the cabby implied that she was already on U St, which is a minimum of 20 blocks from the building. She gets what she needs, and evades the CIA following her. They spot her outside less than a block away, though, and she takes off running. She beats them (running) to a metro stop that's about 2-3 blocks from the Hoover Bldg. What's more, she goes in that stop, and comes out of the Metro at L'Enfant Plaza, which would be fine if she'd gotten on a train (except that getting on a train would have taken way too long).

They catch her, and she gets away from the six or eight people who are all training guns on her. Yes, she only had to move ten or twelve feet, but in that space she needed to stand up, turn around, and jump. And she could do that before any of those people could pull a trigger? A sixty-year old with bad reflexes should have at least gotten a shot off in that amount of time.

And then it got even more ridiculous from there.

Ok, those are mostly continuity issues. Obviously, it was very weak in that department. I will say that the acting was excellent. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to save the movie.

Plus, even the initial premise was weak. This man comes in to the CIA (ignoring for a moment that he went to a building that was a front; if someone does that, I'm sure they would never admit to being what they are. I'm sure they'd tell him to get lost, that he was in the wrong location. Anyway, what he ends up doing is activating her as an agent (plus there was another side to it). That's interesting, except that he told the US government what he was getting her to do.

They weren't sure whether to believe him, and we, as viewers, find it unlikely. After all, she's supposed to be the hero, right? But he is. Now, if that's what you're doing, don't you think you could find a better way that doesn't involve warning the people who are charged with stopping you? Doesn't that seem at least a tad unwise?
There are one or two other issues, but I'd have to give even bigger spoilers to discuss that. So I'll forbear, at least for the moment.

So, I guess it depends, if you're truly looking for mindless popcorn fare, this is it. But I really can't say as this movie has much of anything to recommend it. Angelina Jolie doesn't even look as good as she normally does. How the hell do you screw that up?

Oh yeah. I forgot. They also had a scene where Salt commits a federal crime by revealing that she's a CIA operative. Not only that, but the person to whom she reveals this isn't even an American. That's not a good way to go about maintaining a security clearance.

Update:The scene near the beginning where Orlov is introduced makes for a great game with the viewer, but from the perspective of an agent, it just makes no sense. In fact, not only does it warn the target, but it also blows the cover that you've spent twenty years creating. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Again, it just makes no sense.