Salt

Among the questions one might ask oneself, if “Salt” ever slowed down after its early triggering incident — when a Russian defector denounces Evelyn as a Soviet sleeper spy, planted in the United States as a child — is whether this return to action stardom suits Jolie or not. Mostly, it does: Her feline grace and imperturbable demeanor equip her well for physical roles that feature minimal introspection, and I continue to believe that the cheesecake Lara Croft films capture Jolie at her funniest and most confident (as well as, yes, her maximum pulchritude). I’m certainly relieved not to watch her fruitlessly chasing Oscar gold in dull, earnest, mid-budget outings like “Changeling” or “A Mighty Heart.”

There’s another side to that equation, though, beginning with the much-publicized fact that Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay was written with a male star in mind, very likely Tom Cruise. (Indeed, “Salt” is conceptually pretty close to Cruise’s underperforming summer release, “Knight and Day.”) Very little of the script was rewritten when Jolie was cast — an intriguing move toward Hollywood gender equality, blah blah blah. But that also means Jolie is stuck in a Tom Cruise role, playing a character who seems borderline nuts, who exhibits no sexuality and hardly any psychological life, and whose personal history consists of plot points with no emotional impact.

Another question I didn’t ask myself about “Salt” until the next morning is whether its warmed-over Cold War game-playing paranoia represents an intriguing twist on an antique formula or just the ideological bankruptcy and collective brain-vacuum of Hollywood. Wimmer’s screenplay is a clever concoction, no doubt. He’s taken elements of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Dr. Strangelove” and smushed them together in Jack Bauer’s high-tech, amoral universe, so that the story feels old and new, classic and contemporary, at the same time. Stick a blue headband on Angie, and this movie’s a wedding dress. This is also a highly streamlined script, in which we never get that scene where some second-string character delivers a monologue explaining the story. Given the convoluted and nonsensical story of “Salt,” that was a wise choice.

Fortunately for those of us in the viewing audience, Aussie director Noyce is an old hand at this sort of thing, with a thriller career reaching back to “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger” in the early ’90s. He also directed Jolie in her first major Hollywood role, opposite Denzel Washington in the serial-killer drama “The Bone Collector.” (Noyce buffs: Have you seen “Blind Fury,” his ludicrous 1989 American remodel of the “Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman” series? It stars Rutger Hauer, of course, and the tag line is: “He may be blind. But he don’t need no dog.”)

Noyce is one of those mainstream filmmakers little noticed by the public but well loved by critics, and the reason is simple: In an age of self-inflated, portentous moviemaking, he tells stories in fluid and exciting fashion without wasting anybody’s damn time. We begin with disturbing, unexplained images of Jolie-as-Salt being brutally interrogated in a North Korean prison cell — this is the only time we see her undressed, as she’s getting the crap beaten out of her — and we’re pretty much off to the races. What the hell’s going on? Is she a spy or isn’t she? What was she doing in North Korea, and what happened during her interrogation? These are exactly the right questions, which is not to say they’ll ever be answered.

She’s swapped at the border for a North Korean agent and goes back to work at her desk at a CIA-front company in suburban Washington, until the day when an aging Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) shows up just as she’s heading home for an anniversary dinner with Mike (August Diehl), her German arachnologist husband. Wait — he’s German? He’s an arachno-what? Do those things matter? Stay tuned. Salt and her closest agency buddy, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), take on the initial interrogation of Orlov, who’s retailing an ancient and long-debunked Cold War legend. He says he knows about a secret Soviet program to place indoctrinated baby-spies in American families, sleeper agents set to come alive decades later, like little Commie moth larvae, and munch the fabric of freedom from within.

Tell these tall tales to my colleagues, Evelyn says. Hubby’s waiting for me at home and the pinot grigio’s getting warm. OK, says Orlov, but I know the name of a double agent who’s about to launch a daring assassination attempt in New York. She’s called Evelyn Salt. “My name is Evelyn Salt,” she says blankly. “Then you are a Russian spy,” says Orlov.

No, these really aren’t spoilers — we’re still in the first 10 minutes of the film! Suffice it to say that Evelyn’s not going to make that anniversary dinner. Armed only with what she’s wearing and what she can gather from her secret personal stashes of impressive CIA gadgetry, Evelyn’s got to slip free of 35 impossible situations in the next half hour, like a slippery combination of the Road Runner and a bar of soap in the shower. She kicks a whole lot of beefy-dude ass, and Noyce’s clear, measured action sequences are a joy to behold. She sheds her blond professional do for a black wig, thereby looking a lot more like Angelina Jolie. She uses a pair of panties and fire-extinguisher goo to block out security cameras. She climbs in a window and helps a little black girl with her homework. She steals a biker chick’s leather jacket. rides the BoltBus to New York and checks into a hotel — wait a minute, goddammit! Why is she doing exactly what Orlov said she would?

That would be telling. You may or may not figure out what Salt is up to, but Noyce and Wimmer do a superlative job of keeping even the more ridiculous plot possibilities in play, and there’s at least one major plot twist (and probably two) you won’t see coming. I’d have to see the movie again to decide how many clues are visible early on, but I will say that even if “Salt” has nowhere near the narrative density of “Inception,” it’s probably superior purely as a keep-’em-guessing game. Let’s just say that Evelyn is leading Schreiber’s Winter, who still says she may be innocent, and counterintelligence specialist Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who’s trying to kill her, on a cleverly calculated chase. And that she may not be too surprised that they all end up in that secret bunker six floors beneath the White House, where a bluff, Republican-looking president (Hunt Block) considers whether to launch World Wars III, IV and V.

This is a daring, audacious and sometimes terrifying movie — purely as a thrill ride, it’s probably the summer’s best offering so far. That doesn’t mean it left me feeling entirely satisfied. There’s an emptiness at the soul of “Salt” — again, meaning both the movie and the character — that’s extremely disturbing, maybe on purpose. Just as the story tries to reignite our fears of undead Commie hobgoblins, its star — an actress who usually plays on both our prurient interest and our sympathy — plays a woman whose public and private lives are entirely built on lies, and who seems to have no self at all. She’s unstoppable, she’s ferocious, she’s going to fulfill her mysterious mission at all costs. But she’s not particularly likable, or sexy, or even human.

My task here is to convince you that “Unknown” is pretty damn good without totally overselling a film that admittedly mashes up totally familiar ingredients: a good-looking guy, an icy blonde, a missing briefcase, a car accident, a faintly sinister European city and some bad guys in a black SUV. This is a studio thriller released in February, people, not the second coming of Hitchcock. Still, keep your expectations reasonable and director Jaume Collet-Serra — undaunted by the presence of the 2005 “House of Wax” remake on his résumé — will exceed them, delivering an exciting and unjaded entertainment with tremendous atmosphere, one that will keep you guessing almost to the final frame.

There’s more than a touch of Cold War spy thriller to Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell’s script (adapted from a French novel by Didier van Cauwelaert), even though the question of who’s spying on whom and why remains mostly subterranean. From the moment Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson), an American botanist, and his wife, Liz (“Mad Men” star January Jones), arrive in Berlin for a biotechnology conference, the air seems full of secrets. Wet, driving snow obscures the war monuments and makes the driving dangerous, and by the time they reach their hotel near the Brandenburg Gate, Martin realizes what we already know: His briefcase, with all its important papers, has been left behind at the airport.

From the front desk, Liz turns and gives her husband a long, implacable stare as he grabs another cab to go retrieve the MacGuffin-ish valise. Martin won’t be seeing either the lost luggage or the wife for some time, because minutes later he and the taxi are plunging into the river Spree after a horrific accident. Heroically, the female driver smashes the rear window and pulls him out. But she then melts away into the crowd, and the next thing Martin knows, he’s waking from a four-day coma in a Berlin hospital, with no ID, no wife, no suitcase and seemingly no identity at all.

Let’s tread carefully here: “Unknown” isn’t an amnesia movie, exactly. Martin knows who he is, or at least he thinks he does, but the world doesn’t seem to agree. Oh, the staff at the Hotel Adlon confirm that Dr. and Mrs. Harris are staying there, but when Martin approaches Liz and begins explaining his absence, she cuts him off in best Hitchcockian-blonde fashion: “Excuse me — do I know you?” Yes, of course she’s with her husband, and here he is: Martin Harris, played by Aidan Quinn, complete with name tag, expensive suit and pompous demeanor. So Neeson’s version of Martin is faced with unpalatable alternatives: Either his head injury has caused dementia and disorientation, or his identity has been stolen — by unknown persons for unknown reasons — and his own wife is involved.

Saying much more would be unfair, except that there are clues all along about what’s really going on — and that I’m actually looking forward to watching this one again to see how well the mystery holds up. This isn’t exactly the most challenging or varied Liam Neeson performance, but the actor’s gloomy-growly mode works well for an utterly isolated character, pursued by shadowy villains, who must go off the grid into the Berlin underworld, where he eventually reconnects with Gina (Diane Kruger), the missing taxi driver, an Eastern European immigrant who has her own reasons for being invisible. Martin is also troubled by recurring dreams and flashbacks out of the “Inception”/”Shutter Island” playbook, which suggest that his own perception of reality is muddier than he thinks. Indeed, there are so many references to Christopher Nolan movies in “Unknown” that it approaches the level of homage (although Collet-Serra’s film is much closer to the leaner, meaner, mid-budget Nolan of years gone by than the overinflated genius of “Inception”).

Martin and Gina lead their pursuers on a couple of those high-energy, wildly careening vehicle chases I was talking about, and better still, they entrust their mystery to Ernst Jürgen (the great Bruno Ganz), a wisecracking ex-Stasi man turned slow-motion private eye, who is such a great character he deserves his own entire movie. Ernst regrets the demise of the East German security state and doesn’t care who knows it, and problems such as Martin’s do not especially surprise him. “We Germans are experts at forgetting,” he says dryly, in a voice that sounds like someone pouring coal down a chute.

Collet-Serra builds a tangible mood of menace, based partly on what we know about Germany’s past and partly on the contemporary paranoia surrounding such topics as terrorism and industrial espionage. You may or may not figure out what’s going on with the two Martin Harrises and that biotech conference, but “Unknown” is probably more about its masterful tone, style and momentum than its plot per se. (The cinematography is by Flavio Labiano, and the cool, Schubert-meets-disco score is by John Ottman and Alexander Rudd.) There’s a brief scene between Ganz and Frank Langella — two of the great actors of our time or any other — that’s worth the price of admission all by itself. I’m not entirely sure January Jones is an actress so much as a living ice sculpture, but she sure looks good in haute couture, and plays a key role in delivering a malicious little surprise just before the end of this midwinter delight.