The tagline “Angelina Jolie is Salt” pretty much sums up the only reason anyone should be interested in Salt, an otherwise typical action thriller involving Russian spies, cold war paranoia, car chases and fiery explosions. The only smart move this film makes is casting Jolie in the lead, in a part designed and typically given to a male actor. (It’s no secret that her part was originally written for Tom Cruise.) But it’s this combination of Jolie’s onscreen presence and the script never forcing us to see Jolie in the hackneyed roles of a mother or modern woman – as anything other than a genderless force of nature – that makes Salt seem fresh, despite its unapologetically derivative script.

Let’s talk about the script. Salt opens with a flashback to a North Korean prison, where Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is seen tortured, refusing to talk, until she is finally rescued not by the U.S. government she works for, but by her soon-to-be husband (August Diehl). Then the film flashes forward to “Present Day” where the story actually begins. But this opening is characteristic of the rambling nature of the script. We’re never told how her husband is able to bargain; we’re never told why she was captured; we’re never really told why this whole scene matters for the plot that takes place in “Present Day,” and even after we’re done with the film, it seems there for no reason other than to distract us.

Because “Present Day” starts off with Evelyn Salt wanting to return home to prepare dinner for her husband. She works for the CIA in Washington, D.C., and must take care of one piece of business before leaving work: interrogating a Russian defector. This defector (Daniel Olbrychski) claims that a Russian spy from the KA program will assassinate the current Russian president in New York the following day. No one believes him. And, just as Salt is about to leave, the defector gives the name of the spy: Evelyn Salt. “But that’s my name,” she responds. “Then," he says, "you are a Russian spy.”

The rest of the film follows Salt as she tries to outrun the CIA and outsmart the Russian spies that have kidnapped her husband. It runs like a blend between Mission: Impossible and The Fugitive. The film allows us to wonder if Salt might actually be a spy, and this ambiguity allows us to withhold judgment for her actions – that is, her action sequences. Because without knowing her exact motivations, we can’t question the validity of her choices as she climbs on the ledges of buildings, jumps over the hoods of moving vehicles on freeways, and constantly assumes one disguise after another. We have to just go with the flow, without only occasional flashbacks that cloud more than elucidate Salt’s motives, and it’s not long before the rush of events drops us in the White House, trying to fight off nuclear annihilation. It’s as absurd as it sounds, and it’s only the combination of its breakneck pacing and ambiguous motivations that keeps Salt’s ridiculous plot from being offensive to an audience.

The cinematography, when the camera slows down long enough to let us notice it, is stark and stylized, often with Salt alone in a structure of modern architecture. These moments are brief and rare, but even when we’re being thrown out of cars and knocked off bridges, we never loose track of Salt or the logistics of the chase. There is something to be praised in coherency of motion, and it’s often overlooked in action sequences except when missing. And director Phillip Noyce (The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence) knows how to direct a chase sequence, but – what makes Salt stand out – is that he knows how to direct Angelina Jolie as well.

Angelina Jolie may owe her career to big-budget action films, but these films, especially Salt, owe their success to her in turn. If Tom Cruise had remained as the star, Salt would have been unwatchable. But Jolie has a very specific way that she draws attention to herself (and away from the otherwise laughable elements of her films): by playing her characters with a subtext that directly conflicts with our expecations. She plays her female roles like a man, she plays her hero roles like a villain, and her crazy roles with sanity. In Salt, the film depends on us believing Salt simultaneously as both a framed CIA agent and a committed Russian spy. Angelina Jolie pulls off this duality so effectively that she allows us to forget (or at least forgive) that, otherwise, what happens in Salt is completely ridiculous.