Salt (2010)

Hmpf. It's a strange thing to walk out of a movie and know exactly what is wrong with it and how to fix it without much thought.

Salt isn't terrible and it was entertaining but it has a lot of easily resolved faults.

Fair warning: spoilery things below













The chief problem with the film is that it doesn't really allow any doubt at all. We know from the beginning who is good, who is bad, and what's going to happen. To allow the reader to have doubt, these things needed to happen:

1. Delete all of the flashback scenes. They tell the audience that Salt is likable and sympathetic and likely to do anything for her husband. There is not enough Salt is bad early enough in the movie to counteract the fact that we know she's going to look for her husband. Deleting those scenes allows the viewer to question whether she actually loved the man. Or, conversely, add in some scenes where she's a bad ass and killing people without remorse or something. But, she'd also have to deck her husband in a scene, too. So, yeah, delete them.

2. I LOVE Chiwetel Ejiofor and wish he were in more movies and this comment has absolutely nothing to do with is performance. His character needs to be deleted. His doubt about Salt at the cathedral eliminates any and all minuscule doubt that Salt is a good guy. I understand that he's needed to set up the possibility of sequels but get over it and do it another way. OR, novelty!, don't set up sequels before polishing this script.

3. LOVE Liev Schreiber but he's often the good guy who is really a bad guy so casting him tells the audience that he's the bad guy. And, when we already know that Salt is not the bad guy, the options are limited to, well, Schreiber's Winter.

4. Delete the fragment of a scene in which Salt extracts the spider venom. We've seen the spider and we can make the tiny miniature leap when the time comes but there is no way in hell a Russian and American trained spy takes the time to extract spider venom without having a very specific use for it.

The other huge problem: relevance. I'll be 31 in a little over a month and people my age are the youngest of those to even remotely understand any sort of Russian threat. Now, bad Russians poison spies horribly but cowardly and the Russian spies we catch are a tad incompetent and just get sent home. Conclusion: Russians aren't scary anymore and you're losing a lot of a movie audience for an action thriller if you're eliminating the under-30 crowd. Actually, go with the beginning of the film: North Korean bad guys are super scary right now.