2.5 stomps out of 5

Salt, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alex Pettyfer and Gaius Charles.

There’s no reason to dwell on this movie’s story line, all you need to know is that this is a story that lets you revel in some of that good old Evil Empire stuff, when the bad guys hung out in the Kremlin…and also lets you look at Angelina Jolie’s extraordinary face for about half the movie.

Unlike her turns as Laura Croft, we see little of her figure and most of that during the first minute of the film in a torture scene that takes precedence over cheesecake. From that point onwards, two things happen in this movie: (1) The camera makes a continued, detailed study of her face, and (2) everybody runs like hell.

As my daughter pointed out, if you squinch your eyes up and fuzz out the identity of the person running, you can easily imagine that the movie was scripted with Tom Cruise in mind, because the running and (spoiler alert!) the motorcycle chase bit – and, indeed, the whole film – is in the style of a Mission Impossible. As my daughter also pointed out, that imagining is based in reality, because Jolie was signed when Cruise dropped out of the project.

Now, if you un-squinch your eyes, you’ll notice that it’s a lot niftier to watch Jolie. And we get to start out with an angelic blonde Angelina (savagely damaged by North Koreans) who, by mid-movie, is a brunette dressed-in-black personification-of-evil Jolie. Nothing static, always changing. And running. And shooting. And firing off explosives. And clinging to three-inch ledges with her toes ten stories in the air while carrying her puppy. Seriously.

There will be some regrets at the end, but go see this movie. It’s about 15/16ths of a fine action flick and there’s no hokum, no sci-fi undercurrent. The bad guys are bad guys and the good guys are good guys except for – wait a minute – I thought he was a bad guy!