If you want to know what Comic-Con is like, imagine a massive auditorium filled with fanboy geeks, overgrown teenagers arrayed in full SpiderManObiwanScissorhands plumage, nervous from waiting in line for five hours -- and Angelina Jolie walks in.
The room had been primed with a trailer from "Salt," which on a 60-foot screen displays Angie in full Mad Max-Lara Croft mode. But angrier. That Salt ... she is pissed!
In the film that opens Thursday night, Angie plays a CIA agent gone rogue, or something like that.
She did all her own stunts (naturally, and with a new forehead scar to show for it), plunging her head through a glass wall, leaping from a highway ledge onto a moving semi and -- oh yes -- that helicopter scene.
So it was an eardrum-shattering whooping that went off when she sauntered into Hall H in a black leather jacket unzipped to a vertiginous neckline. She's one of the few actors out there who qualifies as a star -- at least by her presence.
She smiled sweetly as co-star Liev Schreiber, director Philip Noyce and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura watched her get almost every question from the earnest Angie-worshippers in the audience.
"I love doing action, and I love doing dramatic films," she said. "I've had so much fun doing certain films. You can bend a bullet, jump off something that doesn't exist. It was such a nice challenge to say we have to work so much harder to convince the audience that it's really happening. My style got meaner and harder and darker -- it wasn't as fun or as pretty."
Her character suited her, she said. "She's an interesting, damaged type of person … She's not just heroic, or even brave. There's something a little off about her." Pause. "And maybe there's something a little off about me. Maybe it's a good match.
Ya think? From the gal who used to wear her husband's blood in a vial around her neck, I do think so.
Meantime, the action does look pretty rockin'.
