Angelina Jolie pulls a pretty decent MacGyverism in her new movie "Salt".

Salt / Rated PG-13 for violence followed by more violence.
In 1968 Richard Donner directed a movie called “Salt and Pepper”. Sammy Davis, Jr was Salt and Peter Lawford was Pepper. The white guy had the dark spice name and the black guy the white spice name. This was the cleverest thing in the movie. They were London nightclub owners caught up in spy stuff. The movie could have easily been called Bad and Worse. They were trying to copy the success of the James Bond films, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on TV and the buddy film ala Hope and Crosby in the Road pix. What they ended up with was bad movie making and worse acting. In 2010 Angelina Jolie plays Salt. Evelyn is her first name. Nobody plays Pepper. This film is an attempt to mold elements from the Jason Bourne films and the MacGyver TV show from the late 80’s to early 90’s. There are also elements from both versions of the film “The Manchurian Candidate”. AJ is a C.I.A. agent and fights like Bruce Lee with a bad case of P.M.S. She also has the smarts and resourcefulness of the character MacGyver. She can figure things out and find ways to escape bad situations using brain power whenever she can’t just lay a whipin’ on a bad guy. The plot is complex and involves Moles, assassinations and double dealing in the world of spying. Chases and fights take place wily nily and AJ seems to always come out unscathed. The action sequences all look good and the editing makes the car crashes and chases exciting. The story takes lots of twists and turns and until things start to fall into place it’s hard to tell if she is working for the CIA or someone else. While the intrigue is fun, it’s AJ playing the spy on the run that makes the plot line keep moving to it’s sequel set up ending. This movie was made in NYC and environs. An apology to Vancouver is offered up during the end titles. This story was originally written for Tom Cruise but when he declined the film the script was rewritten to put a lady in the main role. Darn good idea as it turns out. The very bad movie Salt and Pepper spawned a sequel in 1970 directed by Jerry Lewis called “One More Time”. It was worse than the original which was a hard thing to accomplish. Salt sets itself up for a sequel maybe even a trilogy. I hope to be there for them all.
Rated 3.50 out of 4.0 reasons that the Salt filmmakers should certainly say One More Time. Maybe Two. If you are a MacGyver or RDA fan check out Mr. Anderson (now 60) spoofing his MacG role by visiting www.macgyveronline.com and follow the link to the six Zaxbys Fried Chicken commercials (three of them feature Cheers actor John Ratzenberger). Commercial number two in the elevator is the best of the lot. These commercials are better produced and directed than Salt and Pepper or One More Time. I’ll take the Nuggets and fries. With a little Salt.

Thanks for the review mrtape.

So this is one of those movies that is actually as good as it looks

:/ I really thought you were going to say she was being cast as the Mac Girl (can we call it that??? Like Bond Girl, only Mac Girl? haha) in the upcoming Mac movie. Oh well, still very cool

The review for 'Salt' in the Seattle Times included this comment:

"After neutralizing a tactical assault team with a MacGyver-esque potion of cleaning products and office furniture . . . "

The reviewer actually misspelled the name -- he left out the 'a', but Rocky has apparently put some coding into the site here that corrects misspellings. Easier on the eyes, but it obscures the actual quote.

Much more to the point, the reviewer (Ted Fry, a regular columnist for the paper) might not be able to spell the name right, but he instantly made the same connection.

That's great. I love that. MacGyver keeps popping up.

A few weeks ago I watched an episode of NCIS. Gibbs pays a visit to a military terrain where recruits learn how to disarm bombs. One of them fails and the bomb explodes. The instructor comments: 'Way to go, MacGyver'.

In the Losers which as it turned out was a Loser one of the "team" proclaims he is "the black MacGyver". They show two angles of him saying the line. They probably wanted us not to miss it and too know how hip they were. To show how hip they weren't he makes the proclamation after firing a rocket and blowing something up. Nothing clever or mind challenging.

Right.
A lot of people think MacGyver is about blowing things up.

Hey, even RDA said it in an interview. I forget which interview it was (sorry), but the interviewer says something like, "I was watching the show last night and MacGyver made an explosive...." (I forget the full quote), and RDA's response was somethng along the lines of "MacGyver blew something up? Gee, that's shocking" (very sarcastically.)

How many times did he pick up a rocket launcher, point it, pull the trigger and proclaim I am a real Einstein? Thats whats happening in The Losers changing Einstein to MacGyver. If he had done something worthy of MacG as AJ does in Salt maybe the line would have had a little more meaning.

I saw the movie last week and it was great. They got to pull more of this stuff. Besides Angelina did a great job. I think she would be a great "MacGyverette". She belongs on my list of action heroes. She's I think the only actress who can actually handle the action genre the way it's supposed to be. Being pretty and tough isn't enough like all those others who star in movies like Resident Evil and what more. There's still a difference between being casted because you can do martial arts and performs some would be cool moves like Steven Segal does and actually do cool moves, spittin' out fitting one liners and pulling it off at the same time. Right now only Sly, Arnie and Willis could (still) do that and in the future Jason Statham. Along with Angelina.

If you can still go and see Salt, do it. It had a good scenario, good tension buildup. OK, it's violent but what action flick isn't? It's one of the better action flicks of recently.

Very cool! Now I know what I'm going to see when I get my next paycheck. Not sure if it's still in the theaters around here, but there's always the video store.