Angelina Jolie can climb up the sides of buildings. She can leap from an overpass onto a truck, dress her own bullet wounds, and yank a guy off a motorcycle as he rides by on the highway.
She can even chase an elevator that’s going down by jumping from side to side along the shaft like a human fly. The woman is amazing.
Now some might say that Jolie can’t do these things, that what we’re really talking about here is Evelyn Salt, the heroine of the new action thriller, and that Jolie is just an actress. But this is a prosaic distinction hardly worth making. “Salt” is a dream tailored to the public idea of Jolie as the woman who can do anything. She can do anything onscreen, just as in real life she can stand next to one of the most desired men in the world and have it look like, “Oh, yeah. Him.”
Jolie’s superwoman tendencies have resulted mainly in cartoonish, abrasive movies (“Wanted,” “Tomb Raider”) worthy of neither her talent nor the intelligence of an audience older than 12. But when exploited properly – as “Salt” does, keeping her human and vulnerable, so that the character’s amazing ability and ingenuity continue to surprise – this thing that Jolie does is, well, very cool. Making us believe in the woman who can do anything, and I mean anything, is Jolie’s distinct contribution to today’s cinema.
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