A Salt on the senses

Salt
DIRECTED BY: Phillip Noyce
STARRING: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor
CERT: 12A

Occasionally while watching Salt, I would think to myself: “When those real-life Russian spies were rounded up recently in the US, why didn’t they run around busting heads like Angelina, instead of meekly surrendering and being sent home to the Motherland with big embarrassed heads on them?”
Other than that I enjoyed the film immensely.
The lovely Angelina stars as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who gets landed with interrogating a defector and, after going to the bother of staying on late at work when she should be heading off to meet the husband for a date, she ends up getting herself accused of being a Russian spy.
Well, that doesn’t go down too well with the lads in the office and they shut the place down tight to have a little chat with her. But she’s not having any of that, so she puts her MacGyver box set to good use and improvises a bomb to bust her way out. Then she’s off on the run, chased by her boss, Liev Schreiber, internal affairs officer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and every other agent in the country in the mood for a sore skull and several smashed limbs. Because Salt is not just a fine cut of a young one, she’s a natural force of destruction.
It’s a good set-up and director Phillip Noyce builds it all very nicely, at least until the big bad plot itself kicks into action and a very silly ending unfolds, with a twist you will probably see coming well in advance.
Even so, it’s still a decent thriller and Jolie does a great job in the action woman lead role, proving that – whatever about the gossip headlines, or Mr Pitt, or all the adopted babies – the lady is a bona fine movie star.
Her co-star Schreiber does his usual dependable thing but he’s a lot better than just dependable and it would be nice to see him stretching himself with more diverse roles. Likewise Ejiofor, also an excellent actor, doesn’t have to work very hard here.
Then again, when all appreciative eyes are on the big star, sometimes it just doesn’t matter who else is shining.

Piranha 3D
DIRECTED BY: Alexandre Aja
STARRING: Elisabeth Shue, Steven McQueen, Adam Scott, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames
CERT: 16

Of all the remakes and reboots (I still don’t get that one) that have plagued the cinema in recent years, Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is one of the few that was worth the wait.
Now he’s taken on Joe Dante’s 1978 directorial debut, an enjoyable piece of schlock driven by the will of the great Roger Corman, a film that piggybacked on the box office waves made by Jaws, while at the same time poking friendly fun at Spielberg’s classic.
Aja takes that last baton and runs with it in the opening scene here, when Richard Dreyfuss turns up as a drunken fisherman who used to know a thing or two about sharks. It’s our old friend Hooper and as he sails his merry way, he’s singing Show Me The Way To Go Home.
As a lifelong Jaws fan, I still don’t know how to take that. It’s a good scene, but it just doesn’t seem like a fitting send off for a man who is almost family. Then again, with Quint and Sheriff Brody long since gone on the ferry to the big hereafter, it’s not like he’ll miss the reunion.
Anyway, an underwater earthquake has released a prehistoric breed of piranha into a lake – the same lake at which a bunch of college kids are going suitably mad on spring break. And since no hungry piranha would be so rude as to turn down an invitation to dinner, the lads tuck in with pleasure.
Elisabeth Shue – now where has she been? – is the local sheriff, whose hands are full enough with the wild young ones and the arrival in town of porn king Jerry O’Connell, whose new recruits include the sheriff’s own son, Jake, played by Steven McQueen – a young actor doomed to spend the rest of his career being referred to as The Son Of Steve.
Now with the water full of eating machines, blood and multiple body parts, Sheriff Shue teams up with handsome expert Adam Scott to save the day and maybe even save a few of the lovely students – perhaps just long enough to find a cure for their severe allergy to clothing.
It’s shameless, old fashioned exploitation with a shiny new look, a film with no pretensions to be anything other than a bit of wild summer fun – if your idea of fun at the movies is blood, gore, nudity and occasional shots of humour.
The cast is up for it too, including Ving Rhames in raging form and the great Christopher Lloyd as a manic scientist who may well be old Doc Brown’s long lost twin.
I still don’t know about Hooper, though. It’s just not right. Neither is the 3D, though there are a couple of effective scenes – and one of them is very unwelcome indeed.