Angelina Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a top CIA agent accused of being a sleeper KGB agent, in this action flick by Australian director Philip Noyce. Now stuck in a Hollywood action rut, Noyce’s mostly admirable back catalogue includes Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American, Clear and Present Danger, and the 1997 film version of The Saint. Salt goes on the lam after she’s accused of having been trained to assassinate the Russian president and put into action a sequence of events that would see the US President (bizarrely cast here as yet another boring old white man) push the Big Red Button and start a thermonuclear war. The film also stars Live Schreiber—slumming it as Salt’s long-time colleague and head of the CIA’s “Russian House” counter-intelligence operation; himself a possible double agent—and Don Cheadle Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peabody (a pretty white name for a black dude, right?), an agent in pursuit of the runaway spy.

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