Salt

The final 10 minutes of SALT accomplish one heck of an amazing feat: they manage to be muddled, anticlimactic and (worst of all) sequel-begging, all at the same time. I was utterly shocked by how this largely entertaining action flick literally deflated before my eyes during its coda. The "twist" and "twist within a twist" are both resolved in a mediocre way that requires two characters to sit awkwardly and explain things to one another. The film's final moments feel jarring and misplaced and don't give the slightest bit of closure to the audience. If there's something that offends me severely is when a film is apparently so confident in how well it's going to do at the box office that it chooses to leave loose ends so that the audience will look towards a sequel (another case in point is this year's disastrous THE LOSERS). It makes it seem as though the producers are so smugly convinced that they've got something good on their hands that they become responsible for ruining their film's ending.

The impressive thing about Angelina Jolie is that she's a fantastic actress when she takes on serious roles like she did in A MIGHTY HEART and CHANGELING, yet at the same time, she can also play femme fatale a thousand times better than anyone, and she's easily more badass than most action movie stars (male and female). That may be what the producers were counting on in their hopes that a "Salt 2" would follow, and unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. Why? Because, aside from the ending, one of the other problems with SALT is that, as much as the action sequences are thoroughly entertaining, none of them offer anything new or awfully creative, and to be honest, they aren't edited quite as well as they should have been.

If the film really wanted to go for broke, it should've elected the large-scale, balls-out approach taken two years ago by WANTED (now, there's a movie of which I'd LOVE to see a sequel). WANTED had Jolie's appeal as a femme fatale, but it also had incredible special effects and crackling action. The makers of SALT seem to believe that Jolie's persona as a badass action figure would be enough to make for a good movie, and they seemed to believe that people would hardly care about the ridiculously convoluted and poorly-explained plot. Too bad that wasn't the case.

5/10