When Bruce Willis makes crash landings in the original "Die Hard" movie, at least he winces in pain and it takes him a few moments to regain composure. In "Salt", when Angelina Jolie jumps consecutively onto six moving trucks on the freeway, she's flying right up and instantly running at Olympic record pace, sort of like the original Terminator except sporting lipstick. Throughout the movie, she decks secret service agents faster than they can graduate out of combat training if she's not pushing out of moving vehicles going 70 mph while wearing handcuffs, although the officers forgot to put the cuffs on behind her. They put them on in front of her leaving her with a slight chance to get away. I guess the point of this movie: don't try this at home.

The essential plot I think is quite compelling, and I don't want to give too much away but only to say that nothing is at it seems until the very end. But I think I would have liked more of the mystery behind the story than all the long action sequences which I felt undermined a potentially complex idea. These days in filmmaking, it seems that the longer action sequences displace story development. There are flashbacks to a greater story but a lot of it was more confusing than insightful.

After a brief prelude in which Jolie is interrogated and tortured by North Korean military agents, the movie begins, presumably about a year later, with a Russian requesting asylum with the United States via the CIA. Agent Evelyn Salt (Jolie) interrogates the defector who tells a strange story about how the Russians infiltrate the United States with moles programmed and brainwashed during childhood. Only seconds after the interview is over, the defector is killing CIA agents and escaping the headquarters. And so is Salt. In fact, the agency is more determined to get Salt than the defector, which is one of the many little glaring plot problems that occur during this movie. The non-stop action begins here, fueled by several plots and subplots.

I think Salt is a decent film but not a great one. At least what it does successfully is keep you guessing. You're not sure what Salt is doing, where she's going, or even whose side she's on which keeps you at the edge of your seat. By movies end, I still had a lot of unanswered questions that were not explained through the action sequences. I also realized at one point, Jolie doesn't say much after the initial interview until the very end. It's hard not to like Jolie but I think she should have requested a bit of a better script with a little bit less chasing, gunning and blowing things up. Jolie can also act, not just chase.

It almost seems as if it were scheduled to make up for the headiness of Chris Nolan's Inception (yeah, I know, it wasn't THAT smart, but compared to the vast majority of American blockbusters...). It's pretty much a Bourne rip-off. It stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who is exposed as a Russian sleeper agent by a Russian defector. Whether she is one or not, her bosses (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Liev Schreiber) decide to keep her under wraps. She'll have none of that, though, as she fears for the safety of her spider expert husband. So basically, like Bourne, it's about a defecting agent running from her employers while simultaneously trying to foil the bad guys. The film does have a couple of semi-clever twists, but it also contains a metric ton of stupidity. There's no real set-up for Jolie being some kind of Bourne-like superwoman, yet as soon as the action sequences start she's either MacGuiver or Jackie Chan. Weighing in at about 95 pounds (seriously, Angie, eat a burger) she's able to beat the everloving crap out of every trained CIA, FBI or Secret Service agent who gets in her way. The filmmaking is reminiscent of Bourne, but, unlike Bourne, the choreography is confusing and implausible. Very little of the plot makes any sense, from the reason for the initial exposure to Jolie's motivations to the final sequence. Any moderate examination reveals the film to make no sense whatsoever.

Salt finds Angelina Jolie using the high flying techniques of Lara Croft Tomb Raider as a deep cover Soviet espionage agent, that's right Soviet espionage agent who is now working for our Central Intelligence Agency. For those of you who tend to the paranoid this is the film for you.

Actually this idea is not new, it was used in the Charles Bronson action flick Telefon and in the Sidney Poitier-River Phoenix film Little Nikita. The idea being that deep, very deep cover, espionage agents were planted here by the Soviet Union to await an assignment whatever it might be.

The Soviet Union may be gone, but it is sleeping phoenix like to arise again when folks like Jolie are contacted to do what they were sent here to do. Problem is that Jolie has grown to like America and she's determined to stop the plot which concerns killing the Russian Federation President and starting a nuclear war.

If you believe in the deepest of conspiracies, Salt is the film for you. But if you have half the gray cells in working order upstairs, you'll find Salt as ridiculous as I did. You'll laugh as I did in all the wrong places.