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Salt – Anything You Can Do I Can Do Equal

posted by Women & Hollywood
Friday, July 23, 2010 at 3:45pm CDT

First things first. Angelina Jolie is a very believable kick-ass spy in the new, exciting, thriller Salt opening today.

What’s so great about this film is that it could be a game changer. The reason why is that there are no gender issues with Jolie playing a CIA agent who kills while at the same time trying to escape from being killed and captured.

Let’s not fool ourselves. There have been women who have kicked ass in movies before. Salt’s foremothers are Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Aliens and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, but that was the late 80s and early 90s, and interestingly both those women had a mama bear focus that gave them the permission to kill everyone around them because they were saving their kids (Ripley did not technically have a kid, but Newt became her kid in the film.)

There have been others who have been more cartoony like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and the women of Charlie’s Angels, and we can’t forget the films that got Angelina started on this track –Tomb Raider.

But Salt feels different — firstly because it doesn’t seem created to attract only the male demographic), and with all the excitement around The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo it feels that we might be at a turning point where women kicking ass takes us to a new place for female characters in film.

By now you know that the film was initially written for Tom Cruise but when he bowed out Amy Pascal suggested that they do a gender switch to Angelina Jolie. I’m going to go out a limb here and say that a male studio chief would have been looking for the next male star for the film, and it took a woman to think about it from a different perspective.

There are other things that make this different, not better or worse, just different from your typical Hollywood thriller.

The violence and the action sequences did not make me feel like I was being assaulted. Yes, she kills people. A lot of people. But if you look closely a lot of the violence is with a small caliber weapon (spoiler: she does wipe out her Russian friends with a machine gun) with a couple of shots. She kicks a lot, and uses her body and her training as a weapon. In other words, not that much shit blows up. But you don’t even notice because the action is so fast paced. There are great car chase sequences and Jolie is basically on the move the whole film.

Another thing I noticed is that having a female lead opened up parts for other women in the film. Action films are notorious for their lack of women. None of these characters are major, but having other female voices in the film matters.

For example, there was a woman on the assault team that tried to capture Salt; there was a female secret service agent on the protection details at the church in NYC; there was a female deacon at the service; and the head of the CIA was a woman. It would have been great to have another female have a significant part, but a girl can’t get everything. And another funny moment that made this different is that Jolie used a sanitary napkin to blunt an injury. She pulls off the sticker, slaps the napkin on her side and heads out of the bathroom and back onto to the motorcycle. That just wouldn’t work for a guy.

I hope the film makes tons of money and that both men and women see it. The great thing is that even before it has opened it has had an effect. Scarlett Johansson is going to co-star with Robert Downey Jr. in an upcoming film Gravity. According to the NY Daily News, Jolie turned the part down because she didn’t want to share screen time with a male star even if it is Robert Downey, Jr. Now that’s some frickin Hollywood power.

And by the way, Salt 2 has got to already be in the works (if it’s not they are really stupid) cause the ending had sequel written all over it.