"Salt"

Salt - Directed by Phillip Noyce, written by Kurt Wimmer, starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, and Chiwetel Ejiofor - Rated PG-13

Jolie is slightly badass in this, but the Kurgan could take her.

When you watch as many movies as I do, you start to see patterns in every genre and things get very boring. I went into Salt, the latest Angelina Jolie spy film, expecting a typical, safe movie that would be completely forgettable. I was pleasantly surprised to see an exciting action film that does not play it safe, but rather goes all out. Salt is not a great film or anything, but it is a film that takes risks and usually succeeds.

The title alone set up my negative expectations to the film. I could already imagine the cheesy jokes about the possible sequel: Pepper. I still don’t care for the title, but don’t let it keep you from checking out the film. The title is Jolie’s character: Evelyn Salt. Salt is a CIA agent about to take a desk job so she can enjoy a calm life with her husband. Things go awry when a Russian defector shows up claiming that an agent named Evelyn Salt is actually a Russian spy and will attempt to kill the Russian president. Salt doesn’t stick around to get questioned and the chase is on.

Up to that point, I felt the film was in “safe” territory. Going with Russian villains (that’s never been done in a spy movie!), a relatively weak threat (sorry, Russia, in movie land, your president is a bland target), and a typical chase film involving an accused spy. And that is what the first twenty minutes of Salt is, a typical movie, but thankfully that quickly changes. The stakes are raised, the action is competent, and the formula is played with.

The formula I’m referring to concerns the accused spy. Normally, in a film like this, the accused spy is definitely innocent. In Salt, I honestly didn’t know if she was with the CIA or the Russians. That really kept the film interesting to me. I felt like I was watching something truly new. This is not a groundbreaking ploy or anything, but the possibility that Salt is actually the villain of the film made it much more entertaining.

The action, the story, and the formula works, but this film also hinges on whether or not you buy into Angelina Jolie as a tough CIA field agent. This isn’t her first action movie or anything, but I think some people still have doubts about her believability in these roles. I actually prefer Jolie in action films over dramas. I like watching her take down multiple enemies with ease. I completely buy into her as an action star and if you’re just looking for a movie that features a lady who can kick the crap out of dudes, then look no further.

Jolie is fine, but the supporting cast really makes this film solid. Chiwetel Ejiofor (2012, Children of Men) and Liev Schreiber (Wolverine, The Manchurian Candidate) are two of the best actors working today and they add credibility to any film they are in. I definitely see some Academy Awards in their future. I like that these guys are not going for the award-bait films lately, but rather have lent their services to big budget and B-movie fare. I’m not saying good actors should only go for the money; it’s just nice to see great actors in less artistic-type films.

I want to get back into the whole Russian spy angle of this film. The plot of the film concerns a Russian agent who trains orphans from a very young age to act like Americans, and then place them in American society and government until the day they are asked to serve the motherland. This might’ve seemed a little on the goofy side if not for the fact that it has sort of happened. Recently, a number of Russian spies who had lived in America for years were discovered. It felt like the Cold War was still going on. It’s amusing how this film’s release nearly coincided with that discovery and it certainly adds a little believability to the story.

Credibility and seriousness aside, this is a very fun movie. A few actions scenes are over the top in a good way. I particularly enjoyed the scene in which Salt controls a vehicle by jolting the driver with a taser. There a few enjoyable spy moments as well, the most notable is a disguise moment late in the film that has a borderline goofy feel, but still worked.

This is not a film without faults, though. The story has some definite plot holes that take a lot of assuming and disbelief to explain away. I forgive the film its problems, though, because the rest of it works so well. Fair warning, though, this movie seems dumber the more you look into it. I suggest you take the film at face value. Save the microscope for guys like Kubrick.

Enjoy Salt for what it is: a spy film in which Angelina Jolie beats up multitudes of enemies with ease and that includes a few twists and some fine acting. I wish it had a different title, because I honestly think this film deserves a sequel…in the future I just don’t want to tell a theatre worker, “One for Pepper.”

Random notes (SPOILERS) - This may become a regular thing...

I have to comment on the ending of this film (note the SPOILER warning above...). I mentioned plot holes in the regular review and I wanted to point out the biggest one, in my opinion. So Salt is captured, Liev Schreiber is assumed to be some kind of hero, and the President is unconscious. Umm...okay. The President witnessed Schreiber kill an entire room full of people before he was knocked out. Are we assuming that the President would forget all of that? Otherwise, Salt would indeed look like the hero since she wasn't the one who killed everyone AND she stopped the nuclear launch. I know this can all be explained away a bit, but I don't buy any explanations that I've read so far. It's asking too much to assume that the President would just think Schreiber is in cahoots with Salt. Schreiber's plan just makes no sense. Why didn't he just kill the President? It would take care of the whole witness problem. There was no need to keep him alive. There was no way that the President would have taken credit for the nuclear launch had it gone through, so killing him would be good to just tie up loose ends. I don't know, it all just bothered me a bit. Like I said in the review, though, this didn't ruin the film for me or anything, it just left me scratching my head a bit as I walked out.

Why was Andre Braugher in this? He may not be an A-lister (though he did get nominated for an Emmy), but he's certainly a recognizable actor who deserves more than one line of dialogue. His part could have been played by a nobody. It's damn near a role an extra could fill. It just surprised me to see him in this.

I know it's cheesy as hell, but I loved this part:

"But I'm the National Security Advisor!"

Schreiber, after putting what seems like a whole clip in the guy: "Not anymore."

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" / The Craptastic Cage Trilogy

*Note: I've made a few more changes. I added a poll to the left that will be updated weekly. I also added a list of links to check out for more movie-related stuff.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Directed by Gavin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, and Danny Huston - Rated PG-13

The summer movie season was supposed to have begun with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but I think it’s going to have to wait for Star Trek to truly begin. Wolverine, despite featuring fun performances from Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, and Danny Huston, tries to cram too much in what should have been a smaller, character-driven action movie. Wolverine goes for quantity over quality when it comes to character, though.

The story begins in Canada in 1845 with a sickly adolescent James Logan (Wolverine) being watched by Victor Creed (Sabretooth), the son of the groundskeeper. The groundskeeper shows up, drunk and yelling, and things get violent, allowing James to unleash his skeletal claws and yell up at the camera. Yelling up at the camera must be one of Wolverine’s mutant powers because he does it every chance he gets, which becomes unintentionally funny. After the yelling and the violence, James finds out Victor is his brother and the two run away, setting up a cool credits sequence in which they both fight through every major American war (except Korea) up to Vietnam.

Throughout the credits, a divide is starting to form between James and Victor (now as their adult counterparts played by Jackman and Schreiber). Victor seems to enjoy killing quite a bit, while James stays closer to humanity. Eventually, they are sentenced to death for attacking their own soldiers, but when their execution doesn’t take, William Stryker (Huston), who eventually gives Wolverine his metal skeleton/claws, recruits them to join a mutant strike force.

The strike force leads to a further divide between the brothers. Victor finds kindred spirits among the other mutants, who all seem to be fine with slaughtering innocent villagers. I would name each member of the strike force, but it’s pointless. They are never given a chance to develop into actual characters and are all forgettable. Ryan Reynolds shows promise as Wade/Deadpool, but he’s only in a scene or two, despite how much he is featured in previews for the movie. This is where the movie becomes bloated. Soon after the breakup of the team, a new mutant seems to be introduced every five minutes as if to say, “Hey kids! Remember Gambit from the cartoon? We’ve got him! We also have Cyclops back even though it is completely unnecessary for him to be in this film!”

If just four or five of these extra characters would’ve been left on the cutting room floor, then the brother vs. brother dynamic, which keeps this movie entertaining, could have been fleshed out. But as it is, I found myself becoming bored at times just waiting for Wolverine and Sabretooth to have another scene together. But I didn’t become too bored, because the action is impressive throughout the film, though it lacks the style from the first two X-Men films (that style was lost when Brett Ratner took over for the third film). The missing style might be because director Gavin Hood (Rendition) is not an action director and had to have Richard Donner (Superman) come in to consult.

Despite these problems, Wolverine does entertain at times and it is very fun to watch Jackman and Schreiber lock horns. The biggest mistake is that the filmmakers didn’t realize they had a good enough movie on their hands with these two characters. They took a kitchen sink approach to the film, which made it an uneven mess that will soon be forgotten.

**This review may be in The Perry County News (link on the left). I said almost everything I wanted to in this review, so I decided to use it for both. This may not be the case for each movie I review for the paper, though. And, to add a little something for the website, I will comment a bit further on some things that bothered me and some things I liked.

More things I didn't like: the scene with Wolverine checking out his claws in the mirror is awful. Those claws were so cartoonish looking they made me laugh. Other than that, I didn't have too much of an issue with the CG, but that scene was terrible. My other problem, which might be a spoiler (fair warning), is that Sabretooth is too different from the version in the first movie. Since Stryker was doing all of that DNA stuff, why couldn't they just create a new Sabretooth, which would explain why the other Sabretooth is completely different looking and seems to have half the intelligence of Schreiber's version. And I wanted Wolverine to get into the dark side of the character a bit more. I think it would have made the character more interesting if he had been shown engaging in this behavior he disagreed with before deciding it was wrong, but in this he's the moralistic hero from the very beginning. Oh, and Ryan Reynolds should have been in more scenes than will.i.am!

More things I liked: the action, the action, the action. Every fight between Wolverine and Sabretooth is great and their banter was funny. I still like the, "Ooh, shiny" line from the previews and the movie did supply a decent amount of laughs. Liev Schreiber is perfect as Sabretooth as well, which is why I wish the focus was more on him than all of the other mutants along the way. I don't know, this movie strikes me as the type to have some kind of director's cut on DVD, so I will have to wait for that to weigh in on a lot of these issues, which could be corrected through editing.

The Craptastic Nic Cage Trilogy - 8MM, Snake Eyes, and The Wicker Man

*I decided to change the title from Crappy to Craptastic Classics. Not a big change, I know, but it sounds better to me. I'm still open to suggestions for it, though.

I don't want to dwell on each of these films, exactly. I just want to point out that these movies get a bad rap. Well, The Wicker Man deserves its reputation, but I'll get into it in a moment as to why I consider it a "classic." First, 8MM is about a private detective (Cage) who has to figure out if a snuff film found in a rich client's safe is real or not. This movie just has a mood to it that I've always dug. The weird music, the dark, seedy places Cage investigates along with the humorous and strange characters make this movie entertaining. And Cage isn't half bad. He does some of that awful yelling/"emoting" but for the most part he is cast well. Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, and Peter Stormare round out the cast, each doing a great job playing a porn-shop worker with a heart, a slimy producer, and a eccentric and funny director, respectively. This movie isn't award-worthy or anything, but it's definitely better than people would have you believe.

Snake Eyes is in the same boat as 8MM. Cage plays a slightly corrupt cop opposite his squeaky clean army buddy played by Gary Sinise. When a politician is murdered during a boxing match, Cage decides to start doing his job in this complicated, stylish conspiracy film. Brian De Palma directs, using his trademark splitscreens to great effect. I just like this movie because there's a noir style to it as Cage deals with liars and femme fatales. I just think this movie is misunderstood and people don't acknowledge the callback to the old noir films from the past. But then again, I love anything that is remotely noir-like, so that may be while I'm in the minority in my appreciation of this movie.

The Wicker Man. This is the movie that features Nic Cage in a bear suit. I don't even want to explain why he puts on the suit. It's all just so stupid, but this movie is so unintentionally funny that I consider it to be very entertaining. You can skip watching the whole movie and just click on this link to watch a compilation of the dumbest scenes from the movie recut as a hilarious comedy trailer. But I find the scenes to be even funnier in the context of the movie. Cage is awful in this one, but I want to point out that I don't think he is a bad actor in general. I know he gets trashed by critic after critic, but he's capable of greatness. Just watch The Weather Man, Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, or Adaptation. It's a matter of character. When he plays these characters that have to show emotion by yelling, it turns to comedy. If he would just pick proper roles, he could avoid all of the bashing. But don't dismiss a movie just because it has Nic Cage in it. Remember the good roles he's had and judge each movie by itself.

Next: Star Trek