Salt

Before we dig into the film itself, a little bit of context, because the story behind Salt is almost as interesting as the story in Salt. This project was originally written for Tom Cruise. The character was called Edwin Salt, and it was being developed as a vehicle for him in the mid-2000s. Cruise eventually stepped away, partly because the character felt too close to Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible films, and rather than shelve the whole thing, the studio did something quite bold for the time. They rewrote the lead as a woman and handed it to Angelina Jolie. And honestly, watching it now, I can’t imagine it any other way. The film also comes from Phillip Noyce, a director with real pedigree in this genre. He made Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger back in the ’90s, two of the very best Jack Ryan films, so the man knows his way around the CIA thriller. He’d also worked with Jolie before on The Bone Collector, so there was already a shorthand between director and star. All of that DNA is right there on the screen.

So the setup. Evelyn Salt is a veteran CIA officer, and the film actually opens two years earlier, with her in a North Korean prison being interrogated as a spy. It’s a rough, uncomfortable opening, and it does something clever: it establishes straight away that this is a woman who can endure almost anything, and it introduces her husband, who moves heaven and earth through diplomatic channels to get her released. That relationship becomes the emotional engine for everything that follows. Then we jump forward. Salt is at CIA headquarters, getting ready to head home for her wedding anniversary, when a Russian defector named Orlov walks in. She’s sent in to question him, and he calmly lays out this story about a Russian sleeper agent buried deep inside the CIA, an agent trained since childhood, waiting for the order to assassinate the Russian president. And then, as Salt gets up to leave the room, he says her name. Evelyn Salt is the Russian spy.

A Female Jason Bourne

From that second onwards, this film does not stop. And I mean that almost literally. Salt runs at about 100 minutes, and it is action from the moment that accusation lands. What I loved about the writing here is that Salt’s first instinct isn’t to sit down and clear her name. She’s terrified for her husband. She knows how this plays out, she’ll be locked in a room for days while Orlov’s people go after him, so she bolts. And that choice is the whole film, really, because from the audience’s point of view it reads two ways at once. Is she an innocent woman protecting the person she loves, or is she a sleeper agent who’s just been activated? The movie holds that question in the air for a remarkably long time, and it’s the tension between those two readings that keeps you leaning forward.

The chase through Washington is where the film really announces itself. One thing that struck me, and it’s a small detail, but it stayed with me, is the sheer scale of the manhunt. You’ve got CIA officers and police pouring through the streets of the capital with pistols and rifles, helicopters overhead, roadblocks going up, and there’s something almost surreal about watching that level of firepower deployed against one woman in broad daylight. It sells the stakes brilliantly. And Salt’s escape is pure tradecraft: improvised weapons, disguises, using the environment against her pursuers. There’s a sequence where she’s leaping from the roof of one moving truck to another on the freeway, and knowing that Jolie did a serious chunk of her own stunt work makes it hit that much harder. The action in this film has weight. It’s bruising, physical, practical stuff, very much of that late-2000s school where the Bourne films had reset the bar and everyone else was scrambling to match it.

And that’s the comparison that kept coming back to me all the way through: Salt is essentially a female Jason Bourne. Same relentless forward motion, same resourcefulness, same sense of a highly trained operative being hunted by the very institution that built her. But where Bourne can’t remember who he is, Salt knows exactly who she is. It’s everyone around her, and everyone watching, who can’t be sure. That’s a smart inversion, and it gives the film its own identity rather than making it feel like an imitation.

Jolie Carries It

Let’s talk about Angelina Jolie, because she is the film. Her portrayal of Evelyn Salt is excellent, and I don’t just mean the physical side of it, though that’s phenomenal. By 2010 she’d already proven her action credentials with the Lara Croft films, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Wanted, but Salt asks something different of her. She has to play almost every scene on two levels at once, so that whether Salt turns out to be loyal or a traitor, her behaviour still makes sense in hindsight. Watch her face in the interrogation scene when Orlov says her name. There’s fear there, but you can’t tell if it’s the fear of an innocent woman or the fear of an agent whose cover has just been burned. That ambiguity is incredibly hard to play, and she nails it. Then you’ve got Liev Schreiber as Ted Winter, her friend and mentor at the agency, who spends the film caught between defending her and doubting her. Schreiber is one of those actors who elevates everything he’s in. If you’ve seen him carry Ray Donovan on television, or his quieter work in Spotlight, you know what he brings. And Chiwetel Ejiofor, a few years before 12 Years a Slave made him a household name, plays the counterintelligence officer leading the hunt, and he gives what could have been a stock role real intelligence and persistence.

The middle stretch of the film deepens things considerably. We get flashbacks into Salt’s past, her Cold War era training, her relationship with Orlov as her handler, and the film starts blurring the line between her cover story and the truth in ways I won’t fully unpack here, because it’s much better discovered on screen. What I will say is that the plot escalates from the assassination attempt on the Russian president at the vice president’s funeral in New York, a terrific set piece, by the way, with Salt blowing out the floor beneath the podium so the target drops into the crypt below, all the way up to a race against a plan involving America’s nuclear arsenal. And there’s a moment in that middle act involving her husband that is brutal, one of those scenes where the film shows you exactly what kind of story it’s willing to be. The final act moves into the White House itself, the true traitor steps out of the shadows, and the answer to who Salt really is finally lands. I’ll leave the details there. The ending also very deliberately leaves a door open. Salt walks away from this story with unfinished business, and the film clearly knows it.

The Sequel That Never Was

Which brings me to my one real disappointment, and it’s not actually with anything on screen. The biggest shame about Salt is that we never got a part two. The ending is practically a launch pad for a sequel: there’s a whole network of sleeper agents still out there, a mission statement handed to the character in the final minutes, and an audience that had shown up, because this film did solid business worldwide. A sequel was in development for a while, but from what I’ve come across since watching it, Jolie wasn’t happy with the direction it was heading and walked away, and the project eventually withered. There was even talk at one point of rebooting it for television. But that original cast, that continuation, it never happened, and I think that’s a real loss, because Evelyn Salt deserved to be a franchise character in the way Bourne and Hunt are.

If Salt leaves you hungry for more of this flavour, there are some lovely threads to pull. The sleeper agent premise, Soviet operatives raised from childhood to pass as ordinary Americans, got its definitive treatment a few years later in The Americans, which ran on television from 2013 and is one of the finest spy dramas ever made. If you want the classic version, there’s a great old Charles Bronson thriller from the ’70s called Telefon built on the same idea. For the fugitive-inside-the-agency angle, No Way Out with Kevin Costner is essential viewing. And if you enjoy Noyce’s handling of the material here, go back to Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan films remain the gold standard for grounded CIA storytelling.