You may have noticed that it took me a long time to get to this one.  It may very well be on its way out of theaters by the time you read this. I really didn’t care enough about this movie to go see it, until I read this review. Against what I’m sure was the review’s intention, I just had to go see what had prompted this concise and implicitly venomous review.

Then I sat down to the theater and knew almost instantly that I wasn’t going to like it.

Right from the start, the writing in this movie is atrocious. Suspending disbelief is made impossible by all the various moronic plot holes and I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single line of dialogue is totally laughable. The attempts at exposition are perhaps even worse, told through conveniently-timed exposition and more horrible dialogue. One character actually says of himself that “Germans don’t joke,” making for an unholy trinity of awkward exposition, unrealistic speech and idiotic stereotyping.

That line of dialogue was spoken by Mike Krause, the husband to Angelina Jolie’s eponymous Evelyn Salt. For the record, here is a picture of August Diehl, the man who plays Mike. Yeah, that’s supposed to be the husband to Angelina friggin’ Jolie. It shouldn’t exactly come as a shock that there’s absolutely zero chemistry between them. This wrecks havoc on Salt’s characterization, because the motivations and development of our protagonist revolve entirely around her husband.

In fact, Jolie actually has more chemistry with Liev Schreiber, but this does not save him. Schreiber spends the first half of the movie as the token one-dimensional character who thinks that our heroine might be innocent. He’s even worse off in the second half, saddled with buckets of exposition about implausible story twists that I couldn’t even begin to care about.

Opposite Schreiber is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays the Homeland Security heavy who’s out to catch Salt. I really like Ejiofor. Ever since Serenity, I’ve been eager to see another film make such good use of his talents (I don’t really count Children of Men, because he was more of a background character in that one). And I’m gonna have to keep waiting. Ejiofor is given absolutely nothing to work with here, serving only as an obstacle who never poses any real threat to Salt. Moreover, the only time when he really gets out to do some action is when he shoots at Salt, who is riding on top of a fuel truck at the time.

That’s right: Ejiofor’s character shoots at a gas truck. A guy shoots at a gas truck in this movie. I don’t know what’s more stupid: That a trained and high-ranking Homeland Security officer could ever plausibly be dumb enough to discharge his weapon anywhere near a gas truck or that the truck in question didn’t go ahead and blow up.

Additionally, in the movie’s very first big action scene, Salt goes from a locked and monitored interrogation room to an elevator. Offscreen. And how she gets from point A to point B is never explained. If the movie didn’t lose me before, it sure as hell lost me then.

The fight choreography is totally uninspired and the camera work does absolutely nothing to make it compelling. All that’s left to carry any emotional weight is the score, which compensates for the lousy visuals and bad writing by being as loud and bombastic as it can be at all times. It does a lot more harm than good.

Then there’s the star of this movie, Angelina Jolie. I almost felt sorry for her during the film, because she’s so obviously past her prime. The makeup crew didn’t even bother covering her age lines through most of this movie and the lame fight choreography suggested that she might be getting too old for the more fast-paced fighting that’s in vogue right now. But most damning of all is the nature of the role she took. It’s not easy to keep an audience invested in a character whose past is subject to revision and whose motivations are entirely unknown, but the entire movie hinged on it. Salt needed an actress who could always keep her engaging and mysterious simultaneously. You’d think Jolie could’ve handled that. She couldn’t. Or maybe she just didn’t.

However, I will grant one thing to Salt: The pacing. This film moved along at a very brisk clip, only lagging during a few brief and well-placed flashback sequences. The narrative is very efficient at getting us through the 100-minute running time, though that only serves to hustle us toward the godawful third act.

The climax of this movie contains a character reveal that takes this movie from implausible to incomprehensible. Even if there was some way to sort through all the mumbo-jumbo to show how it all makes sense (I doubt there is), these characters are so unsympathetic that I can’t imagine anyone giving enough of a rat’s ass. After that, there’s an implausible story twist that’s totally inconsequential, as well as a ridiculous ending that does absolutely nothing except maybe set things up for a sequel (yeah, good luck with that).

And when all is said and done, what was the point? Was there something to be said about the USA’s foreign relations policy? Maybe some commentary about the War on Terror and/or the Patriot Act? A call for the American and Russian governments to start dismantling their nukes? No, no and no. There is absolutely nothing in this movie that warrants a metaphorical or allegorical reading. It’s just a movie about duplicitous CIA agents. The film gives us characters with shifting, uncertain allegiances and tries to pass it off as intellectual. Bullshit.

The sad thing is that Salt was not unsalvageable. This cast and this premise might have been used to make something really special if the writing and direction weren’t totally incompetent. There’s definitely room in the film world for a compelling “spy vs. spy” thriller. This wasn’t it. Instead, it’s a failure on nearly every level.