Salt vs Repo Men

I enjoy watching Angelina Jolie do things. I just do. And really, that’s the highest compliment you can pay an actor, right? I’d watch Jolie do practically anything; if it’s something ordinary, then her celebrity, which borders on exotic, only enhances the activity, making it seem somehow significant. If Angelina Jolie is doing the dishes, then those are some fucking important-assed dishes. And if Jolie is doing something outlandish, say, crossing lane after lane of traffic by jumping from truck roof to truck roof, well then even better. Larger than life movie stars should be caught doing larger than life activities whenever possible. Salt, the newest movie starring Angelina Jolie, would only be pretty good with lesser casting. With Jolie in the lead? Hell, I don’t even know what half that shit was about, but I would see Salt again in a heartbeat.

Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a C.I.A. operative who wants to go home for her anniversary dinner, but has a last-minute interrogation. A man claiming to be a Russian defector has entered the building (which the CIA thinks is disguised), and may or may not have secrets the government needs to learn. So she sticks around for a quick Q & A. The defector claims that there’s a Russian mole in the United States, working for the C.I.A., named…Evelyn Salt. Evelyn’s told to wait in a different room, but knows that no good can come from a defector knowing her name. Even if her colleagues trust her, she’s afraid the bad guys know she has a husband and might go after him. So she decides to beat them to it, and makes an escape, on a mission to clear her name and save her husband’s life.

But running makes her look guilty, and Salt (I like to think of her as Evelyn when she was in the office, and Salt when she was on the run.) finds herself being followed by her coworkers and a team of agents. When she was just Evelyn, she had blond hair in a braid, and wore a business suit. Once she’s SALT, she has jet black hair and wears head-to-toe black clothes, making her look just like Angelina Jolie. Hilariously, it also renders her practically invisible.

While she’s on the run, Salt is one of the more inventive badasses in recent movie history. Besides the jumping truck-to-truck business, there’s also the matter of tasering a cop from the backseat so that his foot flexes against the gas petal, powering Salt’s getaway car; jumping down an elevator shaft; kicking off of a wall to put more force behind a punch; and my favorite, choking out an adversary by looping her shackles around his neck and leaping over the edge of a balcony. Oh nothing, just Angelina Jolie, doing things.

There’s more to Salt, of course. There’s a subplot involving mind control, flashbacks to a mysterious childhood, and a couple nice character turns from Chewitel Ejiofor and Liev Schrieber (as Evelyn’s increasingly distrustful colleagues, leading the chase). Salt was directed by Phillip Noyce, who famously replaced original lead Tom Cruise with Angelina Jolie. Once you’ve seen Salt, you’ll find it hard to imagine anyone else in the role. In fact, from now on, when I watch action movies, I’ll mentally audition Angelina Jolie for the lead. A movie’s success will depend on whether or not she’d do a better job.

Repo Men is even more implausible than Salt, but is just as much fun, with a thread of dark humor throughout. It’s set in the very near future, in a time when houses and cars are basically the same, but medical technology has taken the next step, science fiction-wise.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play employees of a corporation called Union, which specializes in artificial organ transplants. The surgeries are expensive, and if you can’t pay, temporary; Law and Whitaker go to the homes of delinquent patients and repossess the organs, using force when necessary (it’s almost always necessary). Law and Whitaker are fantastic, even though they’re not nearly as close in age as the script insists. Besides relishing the movie’s black comedy elements, Law and Whitaker also display serious action chops. Repo Men is inventively violent, both in the repossessions and in the fight scenes, which are funny, bloody and brutal.

Like Salt, Repo Men eventually whittles the good guys down to one, with Jude Law’s character Remy on the run. He finds a highly-transplanted woman (Alice Braga), and scrambles to find a way out of the country, before the Union guys come for their soon-to-expire organs. By the way, Alice Braga was also in Blindness and I Am Legend. Dude loves a bleak future. Repo Men is ludicrous, damn near offensive, and surprisingly fun. Unlike Salt, which sets its sequel up bluntly at the end, Repo Men goes out in a big way, with a twist that changes the meaning of half of what comes before it. Whether or not you can appreciate it might depend on how much you value Jude Law as an action hero. In one scene, he convincingly takes out a hallway full of thugs with a couple of knives, a gun, a hacksaw and a hammer. Could Salt have done any better? To Law’s credit, during Repo Men, I didn’t give it much thought.

Salt: B

Repo Men: B+