newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Angelina Jolie's high-voltage thriller "Salt" surged into movie theaters riding the wave of the most inventive advertising campaign of all time.

Just before the release of this tale of chicanery inside the CIA, the FBI broke up a ring of "Russian spies" buried deep inside suburbia.

Breathless correspondents pounced on the particulars of that "flame-haired Mata Hari," Anna Kushchenko Chapman, and her less photogenic colleagues, planted here to rub shoulders with the upper-middle class.

These fifth columnists watched "Fox and Friends," listened to NPR, went clubbing and asked the occasional venture capitalist if anyone could explain American foreign policy. (Messianic naïveté this week, heedless belligerence next?) Sort of what New York Times reporters do.

It all culminated in a televised exchange of intelligence "assets" between US and the Reds, er, Redheads. We might have gotten some genuine turncoats, plus at least one poor Russian who still claims he is innocent of spying for us and wants to go home.

For cable news in midsummer doldrums, it was manna from the Lubyanka.

It was also seamless promotion for the story of Eva Salt, who we meet being brutalized in a North Korean prison. Apparently with some reason, judging by the quiet conversation between Salt and CIA officer Ted Winter, who shows up to usher her across the border in a more realistic prisoner exchange.

Played by the solid Liev Schreiber, Winter lets Eva know the agency would have let her rot, but for a publicity campaign organized by arachnologist Mike Krause (August Diehl), who had provided her with a research job and inadvertent cover.

Fast forward a few years. Salt and Krause are snuggling in a large D.C. apartment, complete with the requisite cute pets, dog and spiders. It's the couple's anniversary, but first they have clocks to punch.

At the CIA front company where she works for Winter, Salt's day is going smoothly until a self-proclaimed Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) walks in off the street.

Assigned to debrief him, Eva can hardly keep a straight face through his wild story of a plot using Russian sleeper agents to kill their own president during the upcoming funeral of the just deceased American vice president. Then he drops the name of the assassin: Eva Salt.

Hijinks ensue.

Winter pulls Eva aside. But the counter-espionage officer, forever watchable Chiwetol Ejiofor, wants to interrogate her immediately. Suddenly, alarms sound — and we're off!

The defector has left in a hurry, taking apart agents on his way out. In the confusion, Eva sees her chance and bolts. She appears to be cornered. But with McGyveresque aplomb, Salt assembles a rocket-propelled grenade and launcher from everyday office items and blasts her way out.

Then Salt turns Spiderwoman to rescue her arachnids and pooch, jumps from speeding truck roof to speeding truck roof to make her escape from pursuing agents, and blends in with crowds as well as anyone with Angelina Jolie's cheekbones ever does.

And all that's before Salt starts her real job.

Leading the chase, Schreiber and Ejifor make a well-matched pair, one sympathetic to the fugitive and one determined to bring her down.

The large cast must have liked the pay, because there's only a few scraps of dialogue to spare. Even the great Andre Braugher gets only a line or two as defense secretary. There's lots of "West Wing" style fast walking around White House corridors, but that turns out to be more exciting when accompanied by shooting.

Director Phillip Noyce maintains the brisk pace, pulling off one startlingly set piece in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and vaulting across the holes in Kurt Wimmer's whiz-bang script. The plot is truly old school, taking us to those thrilling days of the Cold War and the countdown to nuclear Armageddon.

Implausible, yes, but considerably less so than the report that the FBI decided to move against the ring because Chapman called her father — that is, her father the former KGB colonel — to express concern that the Americans might have caught on to her. Here's the audio of that conversation:

Spy: Papa?

Colonel: Yes, Annushka?

Spy: I'm worried that the Americans might have found out that I'm a spy.

Colonel: Speak up, they can't hear you.

Spy: I'M A SPY!

In the end, of course, Chapman, those nice Murphys from Montclair and the others in their kaffeeklatsch were not charged with espionage, more like asking questions without insurance. Uh oh, that means points on their licenses to kill.

In Moscow, rumor is that this game of charades was staged by intelligence hardliners in one or both countries, perhaps to get a Hollywood pitch meeting.

But poor Anna has even been barred from her former husband's homeland of spy central, the UK. Under the heading of one door closes, she has been approached to star in a porn film; unfortunately, back in Russia, she's only average.

Not so Angelina Jolie, who is pure movie star anywhere. The leading lady has already dashed through the action genre with her Lara Croft movies and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." But in "Salt," she really gets down to her bad self.

In fact, if "Salt" brings in the summer box office it deserves, Angelina might expect feelers from Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service.

We're told they have openings.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it