There’s a bloodless efficiency to Salt (Sony) that nicely suits its star, Angelina Jolie, given her habit of playing action heroes as cool, exotic instruments of destruction. In a summer filled with bloated spectacles, Salt stood out for its stripped-down (and deliberately humorless) craft; it goes through the standard spy-movie paces without a wasted moment. It could be more original or fun, but it’ll do in a pinch…
The idea of a Wall Street sequel 23 years later, when greed has once again torpedoed the economy, isn’t bad, but with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Fox), Oliver Stone shows a tenuous grasp of the situation’s complexities, and underlines his analysis with a laughably heavy hand. (At one point, he demonstrates the “bubble economy” by following an actual bubble as it flies through the air and pops.) Michael Douglas deepens his Gordon Gekko character, but the script is so coy about his motivations that it’s hard to tell who he really is…
Step Up 3 (Buena Vista) is essentially a remake of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo by way of every Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland collaboration, and that’s just one of its many cornball charms. Without the 3-D technology available in theaters, the film will have to live and die on the basis of its energetic choreography and loving recycling of dance-movie clichés. Thankfully, when it comes to unintentional laughter, the film rivals Burlesque as this year’s most generous provider of guilty guffaws…
A teen riff on The Scarlet Letter, Easy A (Sony) would be a much deeper movie if it fully committed to the issues it raises about high-school sexual double standards. But a terrific lead from Emma Stone and some witty turns in Bert Royal’s script make that easy to overlook…
Five people are trapped in an elevator. One is Satan incarnate. Welcome to Devil (Universal), a silly horror-thriller “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan,” meaning that he conceived the story and left other minds to execute it. Still, it feels very much like a Shyamalan movie, serving as a giant, pretentious metaphor for storytelling itself, with Shyamalan as creator-God.