Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine reviews Salt.

Salt, a jacked-up espionage/action machine starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA superstar who may or may not be a Russian spy, is a movie I have no trouble calling flagrantly preposterous and over-the-top -- impossible to buy on any sober, adult level. It's like a John le Carré double-agent yarn compacted into comic-book trash by the makers of Con Air. Yet the movie doesn't pretend to be anything other than that; to call it out for being ludicrous would be like complaining that Superman flies.

Early on, a Russian defector wanders into Langley and makes the following statement: that the Russians have created a vast underground army of sleeper agents and assassins, recruited and programmed from childhood to infiltrate America. He then announces that Salt, the agent who's interrogating him, is one of those spies. The movie's premise may be may be pure pulp, but it cleverly braids together old Cold War tensions with new fears of al-Qaeda, with added touches from The Manchurian Candidate and Children of the Damned. On the run from her CIA colleagues, Salt is like Jason Bourne recast as a feminist pinup. Angelina Jolie performs the role with a terse, nearly android-like efficiency. She still has a hint of sensuality in those satin-pillow lips, only now that signature feature is set off by a body so uncurvaceously skinny that her entire physique seems to have been stripped down for action.

If Salt were nothing but chase scenes, it might grow tedious, but the movie builds nuts-and-bolts suspense into the question of who Salt is, which side she's on -- and why the Russians, in one very crafty and elaborate set piece, would even try to assassinate their own president. Salt has enough high-octane reversals to keep you guessing right to the end. Even if you don't entirely buy any of them.