Entertainment

Spy Jolie peppers ‘Salt’ with bad-girl antics in routine thriller

Liev Schreiber as a CIA agent.

And you thought “Sex and the City 2” was girly! Superspy Evelyn Salt, a sort of Jasmine Bourne who studies the art of napkin folding, risks her life running away from the CIA so she can share her anniversary with her husband. She also makes a bazooka out of cleaning products, uses her pantyhose to block a security camera, saves her little doggy from armed men and deploys sanitary pads to bandage her wounds. I feel confident that in the director’s-cut DVD, we will find a deleted scene of her ducking bullets while sneaking out to the mailbox to renew her subscription to Real Simple.

Though Salt (Angelina Jolie) does not possess any weapons as lethal as Carrie Bradshaw’s puns, she is sleekly engineered to be one of those “empowering” she-heroes you supposedly never meet in any action flicks. Cue lots of scenes in which, unarmed and often handcuffed, she overpowers half a dozen hugely armed and highly trained men who politely line up their asses for kicking instead of just shooting her.

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The story is very proud of the way it keeps playing with expectations, so I won’t reveal any twists. At the outset, agent Salt is released from a North Korean prison (given everything that follows, why couldn’t she simply have escaped and killed all her captors?). She learns, back at her office in DC, that a Russian defector has come in with a ludicrous story about a Russian sleeper agent being sent to assassinate his own country’s leader while the latter is in New York City to attend a former US vice president’s funeral.

PHOTOS: ‘SALT’ FILMING IN NEW YORK

The defector also claims that the Russkies have a decades-old plan to raise American-seeming babies and then unleash them as adults Stateside. One of them already did his job — disguised as Lee Harvey Oswald. Salt, who speaks Russian and used to live in Moscow, starts to look suspicious herself. So she goes on the run.

“Salt” contains many conflicts: intelligence vs. counterintelligence, blond Angelina vs raven-haired and . . . well, that’s about it. The interior lives of Salt and the other top guns at the CIA (played by, among others, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) are never dealt with. We (eventually) learn which side everybody is on, but not what motivates them.

The biggest conflict, then, is between two kinds of movies: the exacting, character-based ‘70s film vs. the blam-blam and rah-rah flicks that took over in the 1980s. At the start, you may be reminded of such Ford administration classics as “Three Days of the Condor” — a thriller that contains almost nothing like an action scene. Similarly, “Salt” is most enticing when we see Jolie observing, thinking, plotting the next step as she outsmarts the smartest.

After 40 minutes or so, the blaring absurdity takes over and it’s an ‘80s action party. I’m not talking Schwarzenegger movies. I’m not even talking Stallone. I’m talking Dolph Lundgren-Chuck Norris-grade. Salt keeps getting surrounded by large men solely so she can lay waste to them and scurry down the corridor or elevator shaft to do the same thing to the next squad of chumps. One of these guards — and by now we’re in the American president’s most closely guarded space — is defeated when Salt simply tosses a pistol that strikes him in the lip and bounces off. Which is more like a “Naked Gun” gag.

Nor are the stunts anything special. How many times have you seen some celluloid bravo leap off an overpass and land safely on a passing truck? How many times have you seen a goon-encircled hero whirl around like a kickboxing weedwhacker and fell enemies like dandelions? “Bourne” director Paul Greengrass found new ways to make chases and fights visceral; this film’s director, Philip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger,” “The Saint”), simply fires up the stunt-karaoke machine and replays the ancient hits.

“Salt” is roughly as common as its titular condiment: It chugs along competently enough, it’s quickly paced and it doesn’t drag out its conclusion (“Sex and the City 2” was about 50 minutes longer). It keeps you guessing — albeit mainly by piling on absurd twists. If it couldn’t be a cerebral neo-Cold War thriller, “Salt” could still have been a highly engaging gung-ho shoot-’er-upper. Some of the cheesiest ‘80s action movies were more fun than this one because their heroes were trained in a technique alien to Salt: a sense of humor.

Russkies have a decades-old plan to raise American-seeming babies and then unleash them as adults Stateside. One of them already did his job — disguised as Lee Harvey Oswald. Salt, who speaks Russian and used to live in Moscow, starts to look suspicious herself. So she goes on the run.

“Salt” contains many conflicts: intelligence vs. counterintelligence, blond Angelina vs. raven-haired and . . . well, that’s about it. The interior lives of Salt and the other top guns at the CIA (played by, among others, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) are never dealt with. We (eventually) learn which side everybody is on, but not what motivates them.

The biggest conflict, then, is between two kinds of movies: the exacting, character-based ’70s film vs. the blam-blam and rah-rah flicks that took over in the 1980s. At the start, you may be reminded of such Ford administration classics as “Three Days of the Condor” — a thriller that contains almost nothing like an action scene. Similarly, “Salt” is most enticing when we see Jolie observing, thinking, plotting the next step as she outsmarts the smartest.

kyle.smith@nypost.com