SALT (Rated PG-13 for much violence & peril, profanity, brief scantily clad female): Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is saved from a North Korean prison by a CIA agent (Liev Schreiber), marries a fellow (Mike Krause) who is brutally killed, causing her to swerve from her role with the CIA and raised doubts from the agent who'd saved her (along with his sidekick (Chiwetel Ejiofor). They, in fact, suspect her as being a Russian spy. She is forced to flee, to leap from tall buildings, climb steep walls, land on one semi after another while racing at top speed around the D.C. beltway - and later in NYC, where the CIA is amassed at a Russian church to prevent the assassination of the visiting Russian president - followed by an equally daring attempt on the life of our President. That's when she gets more deeply embroiled in one near fatal, spurious incident after another.
All this time, she runs, chases, improvises dozens of remarkably successful weaponry to get in & out of trouble; she changes her looks with make-up while dying her hair from bleached blonde to black. In the escalating cat & mouse game, she escapes from more perils & cliff-hangars than Pauline; and regardless the scrapes, bloody bruises & bang-ups (bullets, smoke bombs flying constantly from every direction) she leaps, flies, crawls on her belly like a reptile - as Kurt Wimmer's complicated script keeps her & us in terrible suspense, wondering who really are the good guys & the bad guys.
Whew! Thanks to Aussie director Philip Noyce - who could capably turn any simple incident into cause for immanent terror, as he did in his Australian suspense flick, "Dead Calm," in 1988, with extreme close-ups that conceal possibly treacherous action beyond them; purposely, incompletely cutting action at a moment of identification; leaping back & forth in time & space - with a youthful Nicole Kidman in the resourceful female lead. (It may be that Kidman almost predates Jolie in this flick.)
Add to that Robin Elswit's exciting camera work, James Newton Howard's James-Bondish-type music (wearing out dozens of tympani), and a generous dose of clever editing from the team of Baid & Gilroy - giving us what we want from a flick like this: an exciting, suspenseful, paranoid plot that is so fully packed with well created chases, car smashups, explosions, gunfire, narrow escapes - combined with the gorgeous actress Jolie (playing the role, incidentally, that was originally meant for Tom Cruise!) - flirting every second with death - it just about conceals all the been-there-done-that tomfoolery about Russian moles and saving the world from immanent destruction until well after it's long over.
Final comment: For a top notch, terrifying paranoid action flick, it does exactly what it sets out to do; that is, hold you glued to your seat with a cleverly devised script, a good production team, and plenty of swift, violent action for most of its 99-minutes. (Grade: B-)