Angelina Jolie leaves the critics with a taste for ‘Salt’

The plot should be taken with a hefty pinch of sodium chloride (even if its US-Russian double agent storyline has an uncanny ring of truth to it), but Salt has left both US audiences and critics gagging for more thanks to its relentless high-octane action scenes and its A-list star stuntwoman Angelina Jolie.

When the film came out in the US last month, critics, it seemed, could not get enough of Salt the film and Evelyn Salt the character, played by Jolie in her first role since 2008's Wanted and Changeling.

The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert gave the film a maximum four stars, despite Salt having "holes in it big enough to drive the whole movie through". For Ebert, what holds the "gloriously absurd" thriller together is Jolie - "beautiful by default" - who also "gets gritty and bloody and desperate, and we get involved".

The New York Times critic AO Scott agrees: Jolie, he says, is "the prime special effect, and a reminder that even in an era of technological overkill, movie stars matter".

Much has already - and inevitably - been written about the fact that the role was originally written for a male movie star, and first offered to Tom Cruise. Jolie, who did virtually all her own stunts, puts in a fierce and dynamic performance and makes the film her own - in much the same way Sigourney Weaver added a new dimension to Alien's Ripley, also originally written for a man.

It may be 31 years since Weaver challenged Hollywood audiences' perception of women's roles but Jolie's casting does something similar in 2010.

Meanwhile in a nice turnaround, the film's male supporting actors - Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor as CIA agents trying to track her down - are for the most part left standing around, gormlessly admiring her death-defying antics (normally the lot of actresses in Hollywood action movies).

Yet Jolie also transcends gender, becoming, as the Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan put it, "not a potent female action star but a potent action star period, end of story".  As the veteran stunt coordinator Simon Crane, who worked on Salt, says of Jolie: "Give her a gun or a grenade and there's no one better."

For Salt fans, there is likely to be a second helping. The plot seems set up with a sequel in mind and Jolie hinted as much this week when she attended the film's British premiere in London.

Salt opens in UK cinemas on Friday August 20.WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:William Thomas, Empire: "When it comes to selling incredible, crazy, death-defying antics, Jolie has few peers in the action business. And we're including the guys in that."  (3/5 stars)

Justin Chang, Variety: "Where the film's old school quality pays off, however, is in the fight sequences; if we've seen stairwell attacks, slo-mo machine gunnings and rush-hour getaways many times before, they're at least presented with coherence and crackle, and with little in the way of high-tech gadgetry."

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:"Salt is a damn fine thriller. It does all the things I can't stand in bad movies, and does them in a good one. It's like a rebuke to all the lusty action movie directors who've been banging pots and pans together in our skulls."  (4/4 stars)

David Jenkins, Time Out:" It feels like Phillip Noyce's flavourless spy thriller has been precision-built as a femme-fronted riposte to the suits-and-boots male machismo of the Bond franchise."  (2/5 stars)
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