My wife and I saw Salt on opening night at the 19th street theater in Manhattan. We enjoyed it for what it was, both both agreed that it was a very surface-level kind of enjoyment. Angelina is pretty good in the title role, and even though I thought everyone else in the film was pretty awful, it didn’t really matter because the whole point of the movie is to continually dazzle you with incredible action sequences (which for the record I thought looked a bit fake.)

Focusing on non-stop action every second of the film really limits it. Think about the original Bourne movie, about how much dialog there was in that film, about how much time the characters spent talking to each other, thinking, scheming. The action in Bourne was contained in very small bursts. That’s the combination that made it so great. In Salt, all we get in the way of discussion are throwaway lines that lead nowhere, like “I guess you were right about her!” and “I know you’re her friend, but she’s mine and she goin’ down!”, that kind of shit.

The whole tag-line of the movie, “who is Salt,” is a bit oversold. Early on in the film, it is pretty clear who Salt is, and even though there are a few twists later in the film, I did not leave the movie feeling that I had been surprised by the story. It pretty much played out as I imagined about 1/4 into the film. One thing’s for certain: the filmmakers invest no time at all having the CIA try to figure out who she is, and that perfectly illustrates the insignificance of this “mystery” to the actual plot.

As far as the all-important set-up of the movie goes, they didn’t do a very good job. They tried a little bit in the scene with the defecting agent, but it’s a pretty poorly written scene, and of course the movie suffers because of it. Without a decent set-up, you don’t really care about the action you are watching. The flash-backs are bad and add nothing. It’s like they were so busy trying to hide who Salt is they eliminated all texture from the film. It’s all people getting shot, cars getting smashed, things getting blown up, people running amidst automatic gunfire, people jumping down huge distances and slamming into metal objects in a way that would shatter any normal person’s bones, and so on. It’s a hour and a half of this.

Salt is like playing pinball: it seems sort-of exciting at the time, but as soon as you’re done there’s nothing to hold on to from the experience.