With age, Angelina Jolie has acquired a certain attributable nuance and sophistication that until recently would have been thought impossible from such an archetypal anti-feminist signature of adolescent male fantasy.  Excepting her performance in 1999′s “Girl, Interrupted” this mysterious icon of sexuality has made a career of adding the superficial sexual sparks to action films targeted at young male audiences like “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Laura Croft: Tomb Raider.”

But with her much publicized humanitarian efforts, her domestic partnership with Brad Pitt and their adopted children and her increasingly scarce Megan Fox-style roles, Jolie has become something of an icon of new feminism — the idea of ultra-sexiness and self-objectification peacefully coexisting with self-reliance and the kicking of oppressive white male ass.  Phillip Noyce’s “Salt” is the culmination of that persona representing a unique instance of perhaps the maturation of public perception and the relaxing of usually rigid social allowance — that is, the perceived non-fluidity, or generally hard sell of shifting celebrity personae.

Along with her striking made-for-the-movies features, it is that iconoclastic air that gives her such presence on the big screen — a presence that serves as a rare positive in Noyce’s convoluted, inane picture.

Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who in the opening minutes interrogates a suspected Russian defector.  The detainee unleashes an assault of grandiose exposition detailing impossibly complex and far-reaching Russian operations all aimed at the destruction of America.  We’re talking all the classic spy movie clichés: double agents, youth indoctrination, presidential assassination, sleeper agents, etc.  But nobody is buying what this guys is selling — that is, until he fingers Salt, by name, as a key double agent Russian operative in his motherland’s master plan.  This accusation forces Salt into hiding while she fights to clear her name and take down the real bad guys along the way.

Both Jolie and Liev Schreiber, who plays her boss, do their best to legitimize this outdated conventional thriller, although Columbia Pictures must have been ecstatic when the recent Russian spy fiasco dominated every media outlet for months.  It’s hard imagine this project not only managed to get a green light before that story broke, but was awarded a staggering $100,000 million budget — a budget which can hardly be seen up on the screen — while real filmmakers like P.T. Anderson still have trouble finding financing.

Setting aside personal lamentations about the film industry, “Salt” isn’t entirely a wash.  It stomps on the gas in the opening moments and rarely lets up until the closing credits.  If continuity, character development and logic weren’t primary concerns “Salt” would have earned high marks with this critic for its unabashed revelry in all things spy cliché.