Salt

Directed by Phillip Noyce. Starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski, Andre Braugher, August Diehl 12A cert, gen release, 100 min

SOMEWHERE IN the fussy middle of this juiced-up thriller – halfway between a cross and a double-cross – Angelina Jolie’s CIA superbeing is asked why she got married. “I did it to seem normal,” she says. You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that, Duckie.

It is rumoured that Salt was originally supposed to star Tom Cruise. In purely financial terms, the decision seems to have paid off. The vaguely similar Knight and Day, featuring the Cruiser as another indestructible agent, slumped at the US box-office, whereas Salt has been a modest hit. Nonetheless, watching Ms Jolie constructing bazookas from office supplies, leaping from high bridge to hurtling truck and donning Dick Emery's cast-off disguises, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that she is flogging the wrong kind of weird.

Devoid of humour, too delicate around the wrists and ankles, Jolie constantly seems on the point of breaking down beneath the awful weight of stress. Cruise’s more brash class of (can we say this?) eccentricity is, actually, far better suited to the hysterically heightened spy movie. It’s not a gender thing. One can easily imagine Sandra Bullock curling the lip satisfactorily, but the Joliedroid 3000 is not built for fun and frolics.

For all the sober muttering about global politics, the plot still hangs around the type of outlandish Soviet plot (yes, the fall of the Wall seems to have had little effect on Saltland) that characterised 1960s TV series such as The Avengersand The Man from UNCLE. In the picture's one genuinely great scene, the protagonist, a CIA whizz, interrogates a Russian operative about a talented Soviet mole who implanted herself in US society 25 years ago. Her name is, it transpires, Evelyn Salt. "My name is Evelyn Salt," the questioner replies. "Then you are a Russian spy," the Russian mutters. She bolts. The entire US security apparatus follows.

Noyce, the director of Rabbit- Proof Fenceand (more to the point) Patriot Games, has clearly been told to shake it up like a Bourne- again action junkie, but the resulting incoherence only serves to emphasise how hard it is to do what Paul Greengrass made seem so simple. You couldn't call Salt boring. It never seems, however, quite comfortable in its own skin.

Who’d have thought we’d miss Tom Cruise?