DIRECTOR: Phillip Noyce CAST: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schriber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, August Diehl
Starring Jennifer Garner, the show provided a simple, action-filled alternative to traditional male-dominated spy movies starring the likes of James Bond and Simon Templar.
Produced by JJ Abrams - the man who would later inflict on the world his initially intriguing, later mysterious and then quickly ludicrous show, Lost - Alias worked on the simple premise that sometimes people just want to see a good-looking, well-built woman kicking the hell out of bad guys around the world in different outfits.
There was a plot involving spy parents on different sides of the Cold War, an ill-advised love affair with a CIA handler and a bad man playing all the angles, but that was just to fill in the spaces.
Of course, Pam Grier had done the kick-ass woman thing back in the '70s as Foxy Brown, but no one seemed to care, so Garner became some sort of wonderful, fresh breath of television air for a while.
Salt, directed by Australian Philip Noyce, is a film that wants to believe it is the feminist answer to the Jason Bourne films, but has to acknowledge that, in the end, it is just a big budget episode of Alias with Angelina Jolie doing what she did as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider films (great examples of why it's a stupid idea to make movies based on video games).
Jolie is Evelyn Salt, CIA agent happily married to Mike (Diehl), a German arachnologist who once saved her from torture by the North Koreans.
A Russian defector walks into the agency on her wedding anniversary and messes everything up with a story of Cold War Russian kids trained to become American citizen KGB sleeper agents. The plot that will do what the Cold War couldn't is set to be activated on the imaginatively labelled Day X when one of the sleepers will assassinate the president of Russia.
All very well, but how can we believe you, ask CIA cleverboys Ted Winter (Schriber) and Peabody (Eijofor). Well, says vodka-infused Ruskie, I will tell you name of agent - Evelyn Salt. And away we go on a big-budget preposterously plotted journey with predictable twists, a built-in sequel set up ending, lots of guns and spiders and evil sneers and double-crossing in a small selection of tastefully chosen outfits.
As a friend pointed out, in Asterix the Legionary there's a spy called H2SO4 - which is not the formula for salt, as he had thought, but is the formula for sulphuric acid, which is a better chemical to associate with the taste this film leaves on the palate.