Big Dumb Action: Salt & Predators

Big dumb action movies get a bad rap. You’ll have to pry my Wes Anderson DVDs out of my cold, dead hands, but there is a time and a place for blowing shit up and kicking people in the face while jumping out of burning buildings. There’s an art to action that can easily be forgotten when you’re subjected to endless slow-motion sequences and rapidfire jump cuts, but when you see a really good action movie – James Cameron or Steven Spielberg in their prime, for example – you realize how great it can be.

The rules are simple: Do lots of cool stuff. Do it fast. Make sure the audience knows what’s happening and they know it’s cool, but don’t show off or dumb it down – slow motion is not a subsitute for coherent camerawork and editing. Try to come up with an interesting character or two, and throw in a few cool one-liners. And most important of all: If you have a lousy script, try to keep the audience from noticing.

Predators is about as straightforward an action movie as you can find. The original movie featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and a team of elite yet disposable commandoes being hunted by an alien in the jungle. Twenty-three years later the formula has changed only slightly: A group of killers – professional and otherwise – is dropped into a mysterious jungle. There’s a wide array of stereotypical tough guys: A Mexican drug enforcer, a silent Yakuza killer, a death row inmate, an Israeli sniper, and more, all of whom eventually fall under the reluctant leadership of Adrien Brody’s badass mercenary. There’s also Topher Grace as a doctor who’s so obviously useless and out of place that he must be harbouring some secret. Most of them don’t even get names, which is fine because most of them won’t last until the closing credits, thanks to the three alien killers hunting them.

There aren’t many surprises to be found in the plot. Suffice it to say that if you’re concerned that Adrien Brody won’t make it to the final scene, you either don’t watch very many Hollywood movies or you have expectations of originality and unpredictability that are destined to go unfulfilled.

This is not a movie about why, or even how. “It doesn’t matter how we got here,” Brody’s character says early on, and it’s kind of a mission statement for the film. Other things that don’t matter: Why do these people from around the world all speak English? Why does no one ever run out of ammo? Does everyone from Japan know how to use a katana? If the predators are supposed to be about the honour and the thrill of the hunt, why do they wear cloaking devices and blow people away with laser cannons? Don’t people understand that showing pictures of your children is the next best thing to painting a glow-in-the-dark target on your chest?

Never mind the array of entirely reasonable questions posed by Grace’s character, none of which can be covered without spoilers.

It’s to the credit of director Nimrod Antal that it’s easy to forget that the script reads like it was drafted by two 14-year-old boys. Predators rarely stops moving long enough for the audience to ponder all the things that don’t make sense. He makes the most of a modest budget, understanding that the time spent waiting for a kill can be far more thrilling than the actual shooting and slashing. The predators spend most of the movie hiding, stalking their prey. We know there’s eventually going to be bloodshed, but we don’t know when, and Antal works that for all it’s worth.

When the action comes, it’s chaotic for the participants, but not the viewers. The aforementioned katana also figures in to one of the film’s coolest moments, when the Yakuza killer challenges a predator to a sword fight.

Yes, it’s stupid. But it’s also really cool, and that’s what we came here to see.

(Antal was actually one of my main motivations for giving Predators a chance. If you have access to a good video store, watch Kontroll some time.)

salt.jpgSalt, on the other hand, wants us to think. Not too much, because vast segments of the film are utterly implausible. But there’s a mystery at the centre of the film that goes beyond “who’s going to die and when”: A Russian defector walks into a CIA office and claims to have knowledge of a sleeper agent who’s going to assassinate the Russian president during a state funeral. When he identifies super agent Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) as the assassin, all hell breaks loose: Salt flees her immediately suspicious colleagues and tries to find her husband, who appears to have been kidnapped.

Salt offers more depth and plot possibilities than Predators: Is Salt secretly a Russian agent? If she isn’t, who is setting her up, and what’s she going to do about it?

But the more important and immediate question is “How will she escape from all the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Police who are trying to catch her?” After a bit of introduction and exposition, the chase is on: First Salt has to escape from CIA headquarters. Then she has to get home, look for her husband, grab supplies, and then escape again, this time by way of jumping from car to car on a freeway. Then it’s off to New York, where she has to either stop or commit the assassination attempt.

When it’s good, Salt is very good: It’s fast-paced and inventive, full of tension, action, and great stunts. There’s no shortage of “Wow!” moments in the film’s first hour, and while we can be reasonably sure that Angelina Jolie isn’t going to die, the moment-to-moment drama of “How is she going to get out of this sticky situation” is finely executed. It’s fast, frequently furious, and compelling.

Alas, it eventually runs out of steam. It feels like Phillip Noyce ran through the special effects and stunt budget too early: While the remainder of the movie features lots of running, punching, and shooting, none of it is particularly memorable (aside from a stylish execution near the very end). The bigger picture takes control of the plot: What is the aim of the conspiracy? Who’s involved? What is Salt going to do about it?

Unfortunately, no one cares. With most of the movie dedicated to cool action sequences, there’s not a lot of depth available for complicated conspiracies, nor is there much emotion at stake when any given character switches sides. Salt herself doesn’t show a lot of emotion – she loves her missing husband, and doesn’t want to get caught – and the rest of the cast is utterly one-note: There’s Salt’s sympathetic colleague (Liev Schrieber), the less-sympathetic counter-intelligence agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the KGB officer seeking revenge (Daniel Olbrychski), and a bunch of nameless foot soldiers who get kicked in the face a lot. The script would need a serious rewrite to bring most characters up to having even one dimension, never mind the secret allegiances and motivations required of a double agent.

Salt is probably the better movie of the two – it’s bigger, more expensive, sleeker, and has more star power – but the shift in tone over the last half makes it more of a disappointment. As I left the theatre, I considered the emotional development of the main character, the elements of the plot, and the stark reduction in awesome violence over the last hour. Despite my immense enjoyment of the first half, I left the theatre disappointed.

At the end of Predators, I was still thinking how cool it was when that Japanese guy had a sword fight with the alien hunter. I’m not sure if that qualifies the movie as art, but it’s a heck of a fun way to spend a couple hours.