Insert Obligatory Salt Wordplay Here
When I title these posts I usually try to work the name of the movie into some phrase that describes how I feel about it. A one-word title makes this easier, provided the word isn't something like "inception." But when the single word is one that gets used around the house, at the doctor's office, and in Holy Writ, there are just too many plays-on-word to choose from.
I should probably tell you about the movie instead.
Salt is a spy thriller, straight-up. The plot doesn't have too many holes in it, and there were only a few cases in which I looked at the action and thought "nope, that just can't happen."
This is good, because unlike The A-Team, this movie can't afford to ask me to put on my industrial strength Suspenders of Disbelief. It's odd but completely accurate when I say that I can believe the A-Team flying a tank using the main gun, surviving a water landing, and then driving the tank out of the lake, but I have a hard time believing that Evelyn Salt could survive that off-the-overpass-onto-some-taxi-cabs car crash we see in the trailer, much less walk away from it with nobody noticing her.
So maybe it's not a straight-up spy thriller. Maybe there's just a little bit of that physics-defying "James Bond" vibe going on. Then again, maybe that is at the heart of the spy thriller genre. I am not a movie taxonomist! Stop looking at me that way!
Per episode 4.28 of Writing Excuses, A well-written plot will have most readers or viewers correctly guessing the twist just moments before it actually twists. Your mileage may vary, but for me Salt was perfect in this regard. I saw most of the big reveals coming, but not far enough ahead to be bored. This is perfect because I still got to feel smart, and I didn't feel cheated by the non-sequiturs some filmmakers will resort to in order to trick the audience.
Salt didn't quite crack my Threshold of Awesome, but I had a lot of fun in the theater. Salt is my new #7 for the year.