Salt

First published on 16 Aug 2010. Updated on 8 Dec 2010.

Recent news about unmasked Russian sleeper agents in New York City might have lent the new paranoid action thriller Salt a kind of currency, but this story of nasty Russians trying to start a global war is a mouldy slice of Reagan-era baloney. Angelina Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative on the run after being fingered by a defecting Russian agent as one of their own. Is she an innocent fugitive or an enemy of the state? Her CIA colleagues (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) can't decide, but as Salt escapes from one hopeless situation after another it becomes clear that she's on her way to a funeral to be attended by both the US and Russian presidents - and she's armed to the teeth. Australia's Phillip Noyce directs Kurt Wimmer's script, which rockets along with chase sequences and confounds with double-crosses but can't hide its essentially facile nature. As for Jolie, she spends the film wearing an I'm-pretty-and-I've-got-a-secret smirk that would mark her out as suspicious in a crowd of thousands. To her credit, though, she gamely leaps off trucks, slams into walls and jumps out of a choppers. She – and a couple of dozen female stunt doubles – must be nursing a lot of bruises. Nick Dent