Salt

I'll be very surprised if I get through this without severe plot spoilers.

I want to see some Chinese TV shows. Or films. Something.

The reason for this is... America is one of two superpowers in the world. The other is China.

We're swamped by American media, over here, and one thing pops up over and over and over again: The Superpower Victim Mentality.

To explain:

In the world today, the USA is safe. Safe safe safe safe. They get the odd act of terrorism but hey, don't we all. It's nothing compared to what they're doing to other countries throughout the world, either through military or economic means.

In the world of films, though, the USA is constantly under attack from Muslims, communists or white supremacists. The country is never more than a few explosions away from being successfully invaded by all those nasty foreigners.

Why? What are you talking about? They're foreigners, they're jealous of us. We haven't done anything to deserve the hatred of... probably half the countries on the earth.

Put simply, the USA of Hollywood sees itself as a victim. A blushing belle who does no wrong, always under threat from those BASTARDS who speak a different language.

That's why I want to watch some stuff from China. I want to know if all Superpowers have this ridiculous doublethink going on. The "Nothing can hurt us" of Bill O'Riley and the "We're seconds away from those BASTARDS bringing our country down" of the films...



As a direct result of this, we get films like Salt. Salt, and films like it, are convinced that the cold war is still going. They truly believe that Russia still intends to invade the USA. Watching Salt is like watching a film from the 2010's with a script written in the 1950s. It really is that jingoistic.


Okay, so the plot goes:

Salt is a CIA agent. A Ruskie enters her CIA office and says she's part of a Russian scheme that planted agents throughout America to blow it up. He then escapes. Salt does too, to try and find her husband. Salt then "kills" the Russian President (she actually doesn't. It's all a clever trick), finds her Russian Handler (the chap who outed her) kills him and averts a nuclear disaster almost set off by her mate at the CIA, who was also a Russian Spy.


Okay, so the one bold move this film made was having Salt actually be a Russian Spy. Everything else was tedious and predictable. The action scenes were actually pretty good but it was hard to enjoy them because the plot was so terrible.

Anyway, I was sitting there, bored, watching this xenophobic piece of crap thinking - I wonder why I think it's bold that Salt is actually a Russian spy?-.

Then it struck me... it's because, plot wise, it doesn't make any damn sense.

The Russian plan does work, up to a point. You get sleeper agents to infiltrate the CIA then, at a point decided by their handler, get one of them to assassinate the president of Russia. It'll spark tension between the nations. I'm really not sure what Russia gets out of this other than a dead president but whatever, we'll run with it.

Where it all breaks down is... Literally any other way of activating the agent would have been preferable to what they actually did. The handler tells Salt that it's time to kill the Russian president by walking into her place of work, identifying himself by name, telling the CIA all about this secret program, telling them that his operation is going to try and kill the Russian President and fingering Salt as the one that's supposed to do it.

Here's some things he could have done instead that might have worked better:

1) Used a contact in the news services to broadcast a fake news broadcast that would trigger the agents
2) Written Salt a letter
3) Spoken to her on the phone
4) Talked to her in a Starbucks
5) Written "time to kill the Russian President, chaps" on the moon.

None of those things I've listed would have been half as damaging to his plan as what he actually did.


The film does attempt to explain this away, in the final act, where Salt's CIA mate says that he persuaded the handler to out Salt as a spy so the CIA mate would get all the glory and Salt would get all the blame. There are three problems with this:

1) It doesn't make any sense
2) Russian operatives attempting to destroy the US really aren't in it for the glory
3) The CIA mate, for some reason, doesn't kill the US president. This means that the president would be able to finger the CIA mate as the real perpetrator anyway.



So yeah, the entire premise of the film doesn't work.

I would have been able to run with this if the film had had any courage of its convictions. I was praying the entire way through for the Russians to succeed - for the nukes to go off. Why? Well it would be something not entirely predictable, which is a plus. There are several other reasons but most of them involved me wanting to jolt this stupid fucking film out of its self satisfied tone.

There's something really *nasty* about this sort of film. It's the whole race against time aspect where everything's so hopelessly predictable. The baddies have everything set up so perfectly the way their plans are foiled have to be ridiculously contrived. In this case, the nukes don't go off because the time from the CIA mate selecting the targets till the launch button being available for use is (and I wish I was kidding here) ten sodding minutes. Nothing is happening in these ten minutes, just a percentage bar of encryption, or something, creeping from 0% to 100% like some hideous parody of a windows operating system. Die Hard 4 had a similar problem.

In Salt's defense, the AV club has reviewed it and said that whilst the plot is *completely* ridiculous, the action scenes help save it. I suspect if you're an American you'll be able to stomach the jingoism a lot more than the rest of us. As for me, I wish I'd gone to see The Expendables instead...