Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Oh, to return to the old school spy-action flicks, the ones full of Manchurian candidates, talking computers, secret bunkers, nuclear bombs, fake deaths brought on by the venom of exotic spiders, and bad guys we can mostly understand and hate without reservation.  “Salt” is a throwback to the Col War era, and perhaps even further, and the fact that it purportedly takes place in the present day is just the beginning of its ridiculous notions that director Philip Noyce asks the audience to swallow.  But he asks so nicely, you’ll find yourself willing and able, for the most part.

“Salt” is, for the most part, one extended chase scene.  One of its glories is that nobody slows down to explain anything; this is just as well, because the explanations likely wouldn’t make any sense anyway.  Angelina Jolie is the titular character, a CIA operative/loving wife who is on her way home for her anniversary dinner when a grizzled Russian (Daniel Olbrychski) appears and accused her of being a Russian sleeper agent.   She blows him off, he kills a few guards in an elevator (knives in his shoes somehow didn’t set off the metal detector at the front door) and then she bolts.  Is she a Russian spy, or is she just afraid for her husband’s life?  If you’re really asking that question, you’re thinking too much and missing the point of this movie.   CIA agents Chiwetl Ejiofor and Liev Schrieber give chase.  By the way, Ejiofor and Schrieber are both award-winning Shakespearean actors.  This may or may not have something do with their ability to catch up with Angelina Jolie.

Sometimes “Salt” operates like a Bourne film, though it never feels as smart.   Jason Bourne was certainly a fine fighter, but what made those movies so much fun was his “MacGyver” side – he could kill you with a ballpoint pen.  Aside from one stunt involving a fire extinguisher and a talent for shoplifting, Salt, well, she just kills people, primarily security guards standing in hallways and outside doors who seem to have absolutely no notion that someone is likely to fall out of the ceiling panels and karate chop them to death.   You gotta feel sorry for these guys; they seem to think they’re Maytag repairmen.

This summer has been filled with movies in which the actors seem to be having more fun than the audience.  “Grown Ups” wasn’t funny, but the actors were having a grand old reunion;  “The A-Team” seemed downright smug about how preposterous its stunts were.   “Salt” is just as big and dumb as those films, but what sets it apart is that it truly seems to be about its business; that is, entertaining the audience.   No smirks in this one.  What a relief.

Jolie has attempted in the past few years to make serious movies that win awards (“Changeling,” “A Mighty Heart”) but hasn’t had much success.  There are plenty of actors and actresses whom I wish would get more serious about their craft (I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Anne Hathaway for following “Rachel Getting Married” with “Bride Wars”) but Angelina Jolie isn’t one of them.   She has a feline grace that needs to be exhibited in action movies like this one.   Perhaps the greatest achievement of “Salt” is that it manages to show off Angelina Jolie without showing off her, um, assets.  There is one brief and very unsexy scene at the beginning in which she is tortured in her underwear; aside from that, she stays very sensibly dressed.  And yet the screen is dominated by the way she moves, the confidence in her gait and manner, the way she looks as she kicks ass and takes names.  This is what an action hero is supposed to look like.  Jolie is an actress of remarkable physicality; it’s nice that we can finally separate concept that from sexuality, which is a different thing altogether.

He is the last noble man in a world of compromise, corruption, and con artists.   His hero is an ancient gentleman simply called the Professor.   He runs a martial arts school in a strip mall, but talks in hushed tones about “the honor of the academy.”   He is the best, but refuses to compete, because competitions require compromise.  His frustrated wife pays the bills.    Soon, you have to think, he’s going to be wandering from town to town, fighting injustice, righting wrongs, and making people say, as he strides into the sunset, “who was that beautiful stranger?”

It’s true.   The main character in David Mamet’s “Redbelt” reads like a comic book hero.   What’s amazing, though, is that it doesn’t play like that at all.   At all.  Part of this because that character is played by  Chiwetel Ejiofor, a deeply internal character who brings some real gravity and authenticity back to clichéd terms like honor and integrity.  And part of it’s because, well, this is a David Mamet film, after all.   He’s as famous for his plays (Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow) as he is for his movies (Spartan, House of Games, State and Main.)  Happy endings, even climactic ones, are not guaranteed in the world of David Mamet.  In fact, they’re rather uncommon.

For this reason, my wife stopped watching “Redbelt” with me about halfway through.   Bad things kept happening to Ejiofor, and there was no indication things were ever going to get any better.   A jittery lawyer accidentally shoots out his front window.   An unbalanced student of the Academy seems destined for trouble.  A movie star (played, startlingly well, by Tim Allen) gives Ejiofor an expensive watch, which turns out to be stolen.   And then some other, more important things get stolen.   And Ejiofor remains stoic, honorable, taking the hits and refusing to hit back.  It felt like a tragic essay on nobility in an age of compromise, a film destined to end, well, tragically.   Not the kind of thing she sticks around for.

Then, in the third act, “Redbelt” remembers that it’s a movie about a guy who can really kick the crap out of people.   Things take a definite “Karate Kid” sort of turn; Ejiofor gets backed into a corner and decides to compete, after all.  I was astonished to realize that, even though from the very beginning this had been a film about martial arts, and had even included some nifty martial arts sequences, it had never, even for a moment, felt like a martial arts film.    Bad things happen to Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jet Li, and you get excited, because you know that eventually, the gloves will come off.   But I really never expected Ejiofor to turn badass.   I thought he’d limp into the sunset, having lost everything valuable to him except his honor, and we’d be left considering whether his sacrifice was worth it, in the end.   This is a David Mamet film, after all.

So “Redbelt” manages to be both an introspective look at honor in the modern age, and a pretty darn entertaining martial arts film.   The ending feels a little hasty; a few things happen in succession that make you wonder where people got the information they seem to possess.   But if it’s not quite intellectually up to the mustard, emotionally it hits on all cylinders.   In a lot of ways “Redbelt” achieves what scads of martial arts moves have failed; it gets us to take it seriously, and then delivers a roundabout kick straight to the head anyway.   I, for one, was floored.

Recommended

• if you’d ever wished you could combine arthouse and roundhouse.
• If you’ve ever tried to run a small business, only to see others run it into the ground.
• If you’re a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
• If you think movies about martial arts are shallow and dumb.
• If you’re curious to see Tim Allen NOT try to be funny.

Not Recommended

• If you think, when it comes to martial arts films, the rule of thumb should be “more fighting, less talking.”
• If you think martial arts, codes of honor, etc, are shallow and dumb.

Redbelt released on DVD August 26.

Also released on DVD this week:  Then She Found Me