Savoring the absurd

VIDEO VAULT: Catching up with Angelina Jolie's assault on the limits of credulity

FRESHNESS RATING: Cataclysmic, earthshaking SPOILERS for Salt

I didn't see the Angelina Jolie spy thriller Salt when it played in theaters last year, but I read enough reviews praising the "realism" of its "gritty" action scenes that I stuck a placeholder on it in my ever-expanding mental file of Movies I Ought to Watch Someday. My wife and I are currently enjoying an accidental one-month revival of our long-dormant Netflix account, so we streamed Salt over the weekend. I guess movie critics have become so numbed to rapid-fire action editing that when someone films a scene that your average viewer can actually track at normal speed, with the naked eye, it seems "realistic." Hey, I could see everything that just happened there. Bam! Just like real life. I think it also helps if a character occasionally grimaces, limps, or otherwise appears to experience actual pain.

I admit to enjoying action that feels like it was meant to be visually processed, and not just blasted into my retinas with a firehose. Where Salt plays by the same rules as almost every other film in the genre, is when it goes into that realm where the screenwriter and director half look each other in the eye and say, "Is it even remotely plausible that a human being could take this action and live through it?" One of them nods, the other one shrugs, and then the character miraculously does five or six of those borderline impossible things in a row. After she's accused of being a deep cover Russian spy, CIA operative Evelyn Salt gets pinned down on a freeway overpass and escapes by rolling sideways over a concrete abutment onto the top of a speeding tractor-trailer. A few moments later she leaps to the top a speeding tanker truck, and a few moments after that, she leaps down an entire level of freeway to the roof of a moving van.

Not only all of that, but she gets shot through the hip seconds after landing on the first truck, and gets pitched over the cab of the third one when it brakes abruptly for a major traffic snarl. The punchline to all of this is that she spots a motorcyclist zooming between the stopped cars, and somehow tackles him off his bike and gets aboard it herself without slamming into anything or smearing herself all over the asphalt. Not only all in a day's work, but all in the same scene. Uh-huh. I don't care if Salt is the best trained agent in the CIA, having the world's luckiest day — part of me just checked out. Sure, it's nice that they did some actual stunts, and, OK, fine, some of that could probably actually happen, but ... come on.

All of that is small potatoes, compared to the battering of believability that ensues once Salt starts to play one of the most comically elaborate double games in the history of spy cinema. It turns out that she really is a Russian sleeper agent trained in childhood, and then the question becomes, Whose harebrained scheme is she following? Her own, or her ex-Soviet spymaster's? The machinations involved are on the level of Salt's infiltrating the White House and attacking the president — but only to uncover the final stage in her mentor's master plan! She's not really trying to kill anybody! Also, I'm baffled by the movie's going through the motions of flushing out the actual presidential assassin, who dutifully explains the whole evil plan to Salt, and then — wait, surely she was taping his overconfident confession to prove her own innocence?!

Kudos, I guess, to the filmmakers for sidestepping an obvious gimmick. Or delaying it, anyway. They'll need that tape eventually, since the ultimate ending to Salt is about as naked a sequel launch pad as can be. The film's worldwide take was nearly triple its reported production costs, so Salt II: The Movie, Not the Armistice Agreement could probably get the greenlight whenever Jolie wants it. I'd say she's got about two years before being replaced by Anne Hathaway (if the sequel goes to theaters), Amber Heard (DVD only), or Laura Prepon (USA Network).