Salt: Critic Reviews

Salt is a complete dud.

It's like a John le Carre double-agent yarn compacted into comic-book pulp as if by the makers of Con Air.

It all happens in such a frenzy of momentum and on-the-fly exposition that some of the more preposterous elements in the story will strike you only in retrospect.

It's pacy, smart, subversive and knocked out with such verve and attack that you're not in the least bit bothered by how far-fetched it all is.

While the plot is outlandish, it unspools with obvious twists and turns. The film has its tense moments, but instead of dazzle, there's a workmanlike quality to the action sequences.

Salt, a ludicrous but somehow credible spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie, delivers a swift, super-charged kick in the pants.

I want the Evelyn Salt workout. Otherwise, Salt is ridiculous.

This is still closer to product than art. Highly satisfying, often exhilarating, refreshingly unpretentious product.

This old-fashioned spy actioner... is fast-moving, exciting and contains more twists than a tunnel under Checkpoint Charlie.

As she tries to find her husband, and perhaps assassinate the Russian president, she's not quite sure who or what she is. And neither are we. Which is precisely why the whole thing works.

Thought the recently swapped Russian spy Anna Chapman was foxy? Hah.

Salt is a senseless blast.

I can't say if this nicely crafted nonsense will sell as a franchise, but I know that I miss the unpretentiousness of the Bourne movies.

It's like a rebuke to all the lousy action movie directors who've been banging pots and pans together in our skulls. It winds your clock tight and the alarm doesn't go off for 100 minutes.

Like the condiment whose name it shares, director Phillip Noyce's run-like-hell thriller starring Angelina Jolie satisfies a basic human taste -- something to go with the popcorn. I liked it. It knows what it's doing.

Crushingly generic.

Jolie's action vehicle is just that -- an action vehicle, moving fast but thinking slow.

Despite enough hand-to-hand combat to glut an MMA marathon, this movie is about as much fun as getting slugged in the head.

Salt is a smart, fast, breathless blast of a spy flick that emulates the Bourne films in all the right ways.

Honestly, if this is the best the CIA, the Secret Service, the NYPD and whatever other government agency tasked with finding bad guys can do, we're in worse trouble than we thought.

Salt is about as believable as a secret training program for military pilots consisting entirely of kangaroos in flight helmets. But it must be said that the star carries her load admirably.

Noyce rolls up his sleeves and delivers an unpretentious piece of action-movie craftsmanship that proves worthy of its star's own consummate professionalism.

Some of the cheesiest '80s action movies were more fun than this one because their heroes were trained in a technique alien to Salt: a sense of humor.

Jolie's days as an action heroine may be behind her. She's still got the cruel lips. But at some point, a cookie or two needs to pass over them to give her the brawn to pull off this stuff.

A relentlessly moving flick that cements Jolie's position as queen of the action stars.