Through a no-doubt-fortuitous coincidence, the new thriller "Salt" somehow combines an oddly retrograde situation with a story and characters virtually ripped from today's headlines. Although set firmly in our own time and crammed with the sort of spectacular stunts, action, and effects that its form demands these days, almost all of its subjects and themes recall a hundred novels and films of a vanished era and an almost forgotten conflict.

The movie opens with a subtitle identifying its location as North Korea and the time as two years ago, but its subject requires no explanation - a lovely woman stripped to her underwear undergoing torture that includes that new American pastime, waterboarding. She denies over and over that she is a spy, a statement her inquisitors of course refuse to believe. The next sequence justifies their position, which shows one of those familiar exchanges of agents negotiated by the United States government, setting her free.

That opening establishes the tone of the movie, which resolutely follows a familiar and quite old-fashioned Cold War plot, reminiscent of the spy novels of someone like John le Carré. The torture victim, Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), indeed an agent for the CIA, interrogates a dubious Russian defector who tells her that his own espionage organization plans to kill his nation's president in New York City, presumably to launch a coup; he identifies the would-be assassin as a traitor within the CIA, a woman named Evelyn Salt.

That information naturally shocks both Salt and her bosses and precipitates the slambang, non-stop action that furnishes the film's essential plot. From the moment of the accusation Evelyn must find some way to escape the CIA and prove her innocence, which for her means a long series of remarkably athletic maneuvers, several car chases, and a score of violent confrontations, from hand-to-hand combat to shootouts and bombings. In the process of fleeing and fighting the police, the CIA, the FBI, and even a number of Russians, the lovely Evelyn leaves a trail of destruction, a river of blood, and a mountain of the dead and wounded.

Although the picture never swerves from its determinedly linear series of amazing chases, stunts, and fights, it constantly interrupts that movement with a number of surprises. For one thing, its makers clearly believe that when in doubt, yet another person firing yet another weapon should foolishly attempt to stop and arrest the fleeing agent; for another, it exploits to the fullest the thriller tradition of metamorphosis. In addition to her frequent transformations of her appearance with disguises, makeup, and clothing, Evelyn Salt also reveals herself as someone quite different from her original self, consequently changing the direction of the plot and the audience's understanding of the character and the people who hunt her.

Given the realities of contemporary history, the film's resurrection of the old Cold War specter of a nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union seems a most unlikely anachronism, and its premise that a number of sleeper agents in this country await their wake-up call seems even sillier. The recent revelation of the existence of a batch of Russian spies leading anonymous, undercover lives as normal Americans, however, suggests that the movie's apparently incredible premise in fact anticipates a thoroughly substantiated reality. Even if they lack the melodrama and excitement of "Salt," Russian moles apparently actually exist, burrowing away happily beneath the pleasant lawn of the American landscape.

The metamorphoses of "Salt" accumulate throughout the film's length, culminating in yet another epic shootout in the war room deep in the bowels of the White House, where yet more Russian undercover operatives reveal their true identities and one of them, the most surprising of all, slugs the President and initiates the procedures to launch nuclear missiles. Perhaps in keeping with the constant shifts in Evelyn Salt's identity, the motivation for all the schemes and all the carnage remains quite obscure, allowing for an open-ended conclusion and the distinct possibility of a sequel. In Hollywood, apparently, the Cold War rages frigidly on.