Angelina Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy, in the political thriller Salt. (Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures)

The last time Angelina Jolie picked up a gun, it was to fire bullets that made a 360-degree trajectory in 2008’s cartoonish Wanted.

Part MacGyver, part Jason Bourne, rogue agent Evelyn Salt is the latest addition to Jolie’s growing line of action heroines.

In her new, marginally more credible spy flick, Salt, her character is unable to perform physics-defying marvels with her firearms. But she still does some pretty impressive stuff with a fire extinguisher, a few sticks of office furniture and a syringe of spider venom. That is, when she isn’t making martial arts mincemeat of burly security types or leaping from overpasses and airborne helicopters.

Part MacGyver, part Jason Bourne, rogue CIA agent Evelyn Salt is the latest addition to Jolie’s growing line of action heroines. It’s also her most dramatically substantial one to date. Or it would be, if this movie didn’t rapidly degrade from a complex political thriller à la The Manchurian Candidate into an ersatz James Bond adventure without the sense of humour.

Our first taste of Salt is deceptively mild. A demure blonde with a braid, as ordinary as Valerie Plame, she’s on the verge of celebrating her wedding anniversary to a gentle German arachnologist (August Diehl) and moving up to a desk job at the CIA.

Then a haggard Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) enters the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and drops a bombshell: there’s a sleeper Russian spy, part of an espionage ring planted in the U.S. since the Soviet era, who is preparing to commit a political assassination that will have devastating consequences. The spy is Evelyn Salt.

Salt’s longtime boss (Liev Schreiber) can’t believe his protege is a mole, but his hard-ass colleague (Chiwetel Ejiofor) won’t give her the benefit of the doubt. As he prepares to grill her, Salt’s self-preservation instincts and espionage training kick into high gear.

In the scenes that follow, the film promises something better than the standard rogue-spy scenario. Salt may be daring and creative in her escape from the CIA’s talons, but she’s also fragile and panicked. Running barefoot through traffic, sidling along the narrow window ledges outside her apartment building, she’s like a nimble but frightened cat. In a telling moment, she risks precious minutes to swoop up her little pet dog and deposit him in the care of a neighbour girl before leaving town. It’s the kind of small, human gesture you don’t expect in an action flick.

The violence also strains for bruising realism. Expert Australian director Phillip Noyce, whose credits include those 1990s nail-biters Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, keeps the action raw and mostly FX-free. It lives up to the movie’s title – it has grit, it stings.

Then Salt arrives in New York, site of her supposed assassination plot, and undergoes a metamorphosis. She dyes her hair jet-black and takes on the glamorous lineaments of Jolie’s other femme fatale roles – the pillowy lips, those mischievous Cleopatra eyes. We begin to wonder, as we’re meant to, if Salt might actually be a Slavic spy. Like Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia, she’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Salt, along with CIA bosses Winter (Liev Schreiber, left) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), prepares to interview a Russian defector. (Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures)

The screenplay, by Kurt Wimmer (Street Kings, Law Abiding Citizen), hinges on a conspiracy that would seem like a stale blast of paranoia from the Cold War era, were it not for the recent discovery of a real (if much more benign) Russian spy ring in the U.S. Despite that frisson of timeliness, however, the story is mostly preposterous – even more so as it starts jolting us with third-act twists and shocks. Its tricks, though, are pretty elementary, especially when set alongside last weekend’s blockbuster, the convoluted Inception. Unlike that movie, it won’t have you staggering out of the multiplex like Monty Python’s Mr. Gumby, groaning, “My brain hurts!”

Salt also proves disappointing given the high-grade talent involved, from Olivier Award-winning stage actor Ejiofor – wasted in a cliché role – to Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), whose shooting here is fine but unremarkable. Noyce and his editors, Stuart Baird and John Gilroy, do deserve our gratitude, however, for avoiding the sort of frenzied editing that’s become de rigueur with Hollywood action movies.

But it’s Jolie’s picture and she doesn’t disappoint her fans. They get two Angelinas here for the price of one – the dramatic actress in the early scenes, then the fanboy’s fantasy after her sultry Natasha Fatale transformation. Not only that, she also dons a male disguise that has her looking a little like the Horses-era Patti Smith. Whatever her gender, she’s a highly watchable action star.

That brings us back to James Bond. If she doesn’t make good on her talk about retiring, and the Bond producers can be persuaded to give their man a sex change, I’m betting Jolie would make one helluva 007.

Salt opens July 23.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.