Salt: An Action Hero in Heels

Angelina Jolie's new film adds some feminine touches to the usual action-movie tropes.

When we first meet Evelyn Salt she is being tortured in a North Korean prison, clad solely in some seriously damaged Victoria Secret. “Oh here we go, another torture-porn Hostel moment,” is the immediate reaction. But director Phillip Noyce takes us in a different direction: almost immediately the camera cuts to Salt’s point of view. Instead of watching her torturers inflict pain, we are tortured along with her. This not only sets the tone for the rest of the movie but ultimately saves this ludicrously fun film (the Cold War never ended, didn’t you get the memo?). It is the highly publicized cross-dressing casting choice that rescues what would otherwise be a typical action-adventure summer blockbuster by using Salt’s gender to create moments that you would never see in a Steven Seagal film.

After Salt’s rescue from North Korea via a prisoner exchange (topical much?) she returns to the U.S., laying aside her spy ways in favour of creating a soft-lit domestic life with her arachnid specialist husband (August Diehl). But the domestic is not to be (yet another great reason to cast Jolie). What follows is a deliciously preposterous plot that requires the type of dramatis personae you would find at the beginning of a Tolstoy novel. In typical spy-adventure fashion we jump all over the world, from abandoned monasteries in Russia, to covert CIA headquarters in Washington, to the bowels of New York’s subway system. But along this sightseeing tour, scenes of gendered interest crop up.

The first comes when the chase begins. Accused of being a Russian spy, Salt, with Bourne-like cunning, evades capture by the CIA and Special Services. But unlike Bourne, Salt needs to lose the heels. Dashing into a stairwell, she pauses and ditches her nude pumps, performing the rest of her Houdini-like escape barefoot. One up on Bourne there.

The next moment of note is when she pulls off her black lace panties and uses them to cover a security camera. First off, there is no way that you can claim that scene was written for Tom Cruise. More importantly, here we have Jolie, one of the world’s most recognized sex symbols, taking off the most highly sexualized form of clothing only to block a camera’s view. Perhaps Michelle Rodriguez was on to something at Comic-Con.

Another nugget is Salt’s use of a maxi pad to stop the bleeding of a gunshot wound. Not only could only a woman do this with ease, since she steals the pad from a dispenser in the women’s washroom, but this is a blatant nod to her gender: she bleeds in more ways than one. But here it’s not a weakness: it becomes part of her arsenal of tools for survival. And it’s a trick I’d love to see Sylvester Stallone try.

So is Salt a feminist blockbuster? It’s hard to say. The film is certainly set in a man’s world. Salt constantly has to find a back way in: breaking a concrete wall when bulletproof glass won’t cave and scaling walls when halls are blocked. Her final coup is a subterranean sneak attack on Russian President Matveyev (that name sound familiar?). Importantly, she only walks in a front door once – and she is disguised as a man. Salt isn’t breaking down the patriarchal order, but she does have the skills to navigate, and more importantly, dominate the current one. And she can do it in either heels or flats.