Surprises.  Shocking revelations.  The Art of the Twist.

The Mousetrap Movie.

You’ve stumbled onto part three of a series about Mousetrap Movies: movies that place form over function, that plot a lot and leave character thin.  Last time, we dissected “Inception,” which I thought to be a cool movie.  Before that, I wrote an introduction on the nature of Mousetrap movies, which you can read here. Today, we’re dissecting “Salt.”  To be honest, I really didn’t like the film.  But even if a film isn’t that good, it has its good points, and we have something to learn.

First, let me defend “the good schtuff:”  Philip Noyce is a fantastic technician, and his specificity with the camera (not to mention his resume) proves that he’s better than the material.  Angelina Jolie gave a committed, physical performance, and brought unbelievable star power to the role.

With Salt, I’m gonna take a “lessons learned” approach.  If you’re reading this, the odds are decent that you’re an aspiring filmmaker (that’s what Death to The Movies is all about), and you want to learn how to tell a story.  I’ll try to point out where I felt the film was flawed, and what you guys can learn from it as you write your own stories.  First, let’s break down the film’s plot.  P.S., this is gonna be extremely spoiler-heavy.

SPOILERS—AND I MEAN ALL OF THEM–BEGIN

Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt.  As the film opens, she’s being tortured by North Korean soldiers, who are convinced she was sent by the US to spy on North Korea (she was).  She’s rescued by her husband, who pulled a lot of strings to free her.*  She cries.

Fast forward like ten years or something.  Evelyn Salt, who’s just as hot as she was ten years ago, now works at the CIA, I think.  I’m pretty sure she’s Jack Ryan, except she’s Angelina Jolie and (as we’ll find) knows kung fu.  Anyway, she’s about to leave work when this Russian dude walks in wanting to defect.  Evelyn Salt interrogates him.

The Russian dude tells a weird story about how Russia planted sleeper agents in the US like forty years ago to assassinate important people.***  He then claims that Evelyn Salt is a Russian sleeper agent, and that she’s gonna assassinate the President of Russia**** sometime during the week, or today, or whatever.  She claims otherwise.  The other agent dudes tell her she needs to stayand be interrogated as a matter of course.  She says her husband’s in danger.  They tell her to stick around.  She turns into Jason Bourne****and fights her way out.  Indeed, she even does the same Spider-Man stuff that Matt Damon did in The Bourne Supremacy.

Blah blah blah a bunch of chases…

Angelina Jolie makes it to some event where the Russian President is making a speech.  There’s a big action sequence where she shoots him, apparently killing him.

Ah hah!  The audience says.  Angelina Jolie IS THE BAD GUY!!  But she CAN’T BE!

It is here that we know THERE MUST BE A TWIST.  We know this simply because Angelina Jolie can’t be the bad guy.  The movie becomes totally dependent on her star power and skill as a performer here.  This scene is the cruxof the movie, and from a plotting standpoint is why I believe it ultimately fails. We’ll get back to this later.

The sequence that follows killed the movie for me.  Angelina goes to a secret hideout of a bunch of Russian baddies led by… the guy from the first scene, the one that accused her of being an assassin!

I don’t get it.  Why would he bother to try and defect at the beginning of the film?  Why didn’t he just let Salt do her thing?  If she was supposed to go kill the Russin President, why would he blow her cover so she has to go running, THEN go kill the Russian President?

Anyway… not only is the Russian guy there, so is Evelyn Salt’s husband, Angelina’s only love.  The Russian guy promptly has him husband shot and killed.  Then the Russian guy says he’s got some plot to kill the President and launch all of America’s nuclear missiles, starting a world war or something.*****

Angelina goes Kill Bill, wastes EVERYONE AT THE HIDEOUT, then meat-grinds the Russian guy’s face with a broken glass bottle.  It’s meant to be an awesome action movie moment, and maybe for some of you it was.  For me, this is when the film became too much.

So now she’s gotta go save the President.  Flash forward to the White House.  She’s dressed as a man. She’s with a Russian operative.  They talk shop.  They go through a metal detector.  The Russian operative gets through, in spite of setting the metal detector off, because, he says… he has shrapnel lodged in his body.******  He gets through, pulls a gun, and blah blah there’s an action sequence.  Angelina does some ridiculous stunt crap and ends up in a bunker below the White House.

By the way, one of the good guys from the beginning of the film takes a machine gun, kills everybody but the President,******* and orders the President to launch nukes.  So he’s the bad guy now.

Angelina shows up, shoots a bunch of stuff, gets in a fight with the bad guy, takes him out, and is arrested by one of the dudes that has been chasing her all along.********

She goes on a helicopter with the guy, and explains the whole ridiculous plot to him.  He gets a text message (!) that proves her innocence.  He lets her go, and she jumps into the Potomac.  Music swells.  “Directed by Philip Noyce,” et al.

SPOILERS END.  EXCEPT I TALK ABOUT THEM FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

Maybe you liked the movie, maybe you didn’t.  I wanna comment for a bit on the two moments ultimately bring “Salt” to a halt.

First…

…the moment in which Evelyn Salt sort-of assassinates the Russian President.  At this moment, the audience doesn’t know what to think of the main character. Should we like her or shouldn’t we?  The audience loses its connection with the main character.  Once that connection is broken, we don’t know what to believe.  Since the supporting characters in the film are cardboard-thin, and because we don’t know who the good guys are/aren’t anyway, the audience has no established trust with any of the film’s characters.

Consider the first “Mission: Impossible” film, which blew my mind when I was a teenager.  It’s a twisty-turny film, but one thing is clear from the first frame of the film to the last:  Tom Cruise is The Good Guy.  He is our witness as loyalties change, betrayals occur, and ‘splosions grace our  eyelids.  The plot might be a little thick for you, but our connection to Tom Cruise’s character keeps us engaged and secure.

Consider “LA Confidential,” a great film noir with about a trillion characters.  But when you think about it, there’s only one big surprise revelation in the film, in which a character changes from One of The Good Guys to One of the Bad Guys.  The rest of the characters, especially the leads played by Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey, are transparent characters with no hidden agendas.  In short, the audience always knows who they can trust.

Second…

…the moment in which Evelyn Salt betrays her Russian Assassin Mentor and kills him with a glass bottle, soon after the Mentor killed her husband.  By this point, the audience is exhausted after three huge twists in like fifteen minutes.  It’s too much.  In fact, the film’s Everything-With-An-Exclamation-Point approach to handling the story didn’t work for me.  I was tired of being “shocked” every time a char