The director of “Salt” Phillip Noyce has proven his talents over a career that has spanned three decades. From his breakthrough film “Dead Calm” to the Oscar-nominated “The Quiet American,” his best work has focused more on character and drama. He is only a middling action director.

“Salt” is a composite of this tendency. There’s a moment in the early going when a character-based suspense film seemed to be developing as a balance for the action elements promised in the ads. But unfortunately, this didn’t last long.

In fact, the film’s plot might be better summarized as pre- and post-dialogue. The first 10 minutes cover the course of two years in the life of CIA agent Evelyn Salt, as played by a blond Angelina Jolie.

The plot follows Salt through a brutal opening scene spent on the floor of a North Korean torture chamber. With the help of her partner at the CIA Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber, “X Men Origins: Wolverine,” “The Daytrippers”), her naturalized German boyfriend has successfully petitioned the US government to arrange a prisoner exchange.

A reunion scene soon leads to a wedding and a reserved but endearing breakfast exchange on the morning of the couple’s second anniversary. Through some efficient exposition, we learn that he is a successful entomologist, she loves his quirks, and they both are enamored with their pet dog.

Just as she leaves the office early to start preparing an anniversary dinner, she is called in for an interrogation of a Russian agent. He claims that a sleeper agent plans to assassinate the Russian president during an upcoming visit to New York. The twist is that he says the sleeper agent is Salt (this is NOT a spoiler).

Her colleagues wouldn’t be inclined to believe him but for the readings of a brain scan that apparently demonstrate he is telling the truth. This leads to a baffling sequence of events that ultimately make or break the film.

Her colleagues decide to lock her up and interrogate her, even though she had proved her loyalty through enduring the North Koreans’ torture. But their doubt of her calls into question the quick change of loyalties within government circles and proposes some interesting possibilities for exploration.

She panics, not because of their suspicions as one might expect, but because she fears the Russians will kill her husband. Five or 10 minutes of mayhem ensue as she proves her action chops by busting out of confinement and leading agents Winter and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor, “Children of Men,” “Serenity”) through a couple of chase scenes back to her DC apartment.

The intrigue of why Salt is running and the forces that are causing her settles in when she finds her husband missing. Why would she risk her life to return to the apartment when the Russians and the CIA should know she would return? Why was her husband taken? If she is a sleeper agent, how has she fooled the CIA for a whole career?

Here is where the film enters the post-dialogue phase and makes some poor choices as a result.

The film might have explored the intrigue by opening up Salt’s inner life and emotions. But, as Salt escapes the CIA again at her apartment through another series of chases, the film essentially abandons exploration or dialogue for a nearly constant stream of quick-and-easy action, which as stated earlier, isn’t Noyce’s strength.

Part of the intrigue, of course, is not knowing whether Salt is loyal to the United States or Russia. So, certainly not all of her character can be revealed.

Why, then, isn’t the film better informed by the Jason Bourne trilogy? Clearly “Salt” emulates its style of constant action.

But the Bourne trilogy, particularly the first film, dramatized its protagonist’s emotions and psychology. His interactions revealed more about who he was and who he had become, even as they expanded the scope of the earlier questions and posed new ones.

Salt’s character, on the other hand, is a complete cipher of the variety that might be controlled with a joystick and an Xbox. Her interactions with other characters serve only to provide more action. Flashbacks to her childhood ultimately shed no light on her adult nature or experiences.

The result is a string of some fairly nifty, if unbelievable, action moves that hardly distinguish the film from a hundred other summer blockbusters over the years. Which is too bad. Noyce had the potential to add some depth to the project that might have made it a match for the Bourne trilogy.

“Salt” merits two out of four stars.

The films of director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan are incredibly original, and he also populates them with a variety of clever references and repeated motifs. “Inception,” his latest film, is no exception.

The title, for instance, is nearly identical to that of his third film, “Insomnia.” Major plot and thematic elements of both films mirror each other.

The protagonist of “Insomnia,” played by Al Pacino, is an FBI agent who battles insomnia caused by the midnight sun and his subconscious projections about past transgressions. His inability to sleep blurs the distinctions between what is real or imagined and what is happening or remembered.

The protagonist of “Inception”  is a man named Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who battles the subconscious from the other side of the law. Cobb is a thief who steals corporate secrets from within the sleeping minds of his targets. His forays across the boundaries between wakefulness and dreams also blur the distinction between reality and imagination, including the projections of the subconscious mind.

Cobb is fighting for something a little more threatening and personal than Pacino’s protagonist, though. He has fled America to avoid criminal charges in connection to his wife’s suicide, leaving his children behind in the care of their grandfather (Michael Caine, “The Dark Knight,” “Sleuth”). The offer of a Japanese billionaire (played with sober tenacity by Ken Wantanabe, “The Last Samurai,” “Memoirs of a Geisha”) to arrange for his exoneration in exchange for performing one last job is too good to refuse.

Cobb’s anguish about his wife and kids, and its physical manifestation in his life, draws eerie similarities to the world of the protagonist DiCaprio played in “Shutter Island,” his most recent feature film. His “Shutter Island” character is almost a sketch of Cobb, with sweaty, tortured grimaces and a knack for remaining sympathetic, even as his anguish and its manifestations threaten the lives of characters trying to help him.

In “Inception”, these characters are members of the team Cobb assembles to complete the job, which involves the practice of inception: planting an idea into a person’s dreams and convincing that person the idea was his or her own. Their target is a wealthy heir (Cillian Murphy, who appeared in both of Nolan’s Batman films) who must be convinced to split up the multinational corporation he inherits.

Inception is a risky practice, among those who make a profession of infiltrating dreams, that has rarely or never worked. Apparently, the human mind rejects ideas planted by others. The subconscious creates projections of dream bodyguards who attack would-be idea planters like white blood cells fighting pathogens.

These bodyguards manifest themselves as passersby who stare at infiltrators or as action movie thugs who shoot first and ask questions later. It is this latter kind of bodyguards who give rise to most of the film’s action. They fire hundreds of bursts of machine gun bullets, drive recklessly through the streets, and blow things up.

Because they’re just projections, there is less of a moral quandary about killing them. The filmmakers and the protagonists kill them ingeniously and with much f/x fanfare. It makes the action interesting, and it also raises the stakes.

Usually, if people die inside a dream they simply wake up. But Cobb and his team have constructed an elaborate plan to fool their target that consists of creating dreams within dreams. This requires a heavy sedative that prevents dreamers from waking up and causes them to enter a state of mental limbo from which they might never return if they should die in the dream.

To Nolan’s credit, this is a sci-fi film. It’s fairly easy to suspend enough disbelief to accept the possibility that someone can occupy another’s dreams because the circumstances surrounding such a feat are inherently consistent within the film.

The setup allows Nolan to explore some mind-bending possibilities about the nature of reality and special effects. The dreamscapes themselves can be manipulated by what is called an architect: someone who builds dreams. This accounts for the cool shots from the previews of Paris streets bending at 90-degree angles to themselves and eventually overhead through the sky.

But multiplying the complexity by featuring dreams within dreams allows for multiple storylines that occur at once and can have their own onset, setup, and climax. Characters can be, say, riding in a van that flies off a bridge in one dream and fighting in zero-G with bodyguard thugs in another.

It also allows for interesting observations about the nature of reality. Time passes differently within each dream. When people are dreaming and wake up, they might not actually be waking up to reality but a dream within a dream. This offers some interesting interactions between reality and fantasy.

The interactions Nolan is most concerned with involve the characters, and particularly Cobb, and involuntary creations of the mind, not just the bodyguard thugs but the persistence of ideas and memories.

Cobb’s dead wife, Mal (the talented and alluring Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose),” starts appearing during his dream infiltrations, sometimes innocuously, as when she is waiting for Cobb in a hotel room. But at other times, and increasingly as the film progresses, she is jealous or downright malevolent (pardon the pun), as when she holds guns and sharp objects. Her persistence is something that Cobb must reckon with before she endangers him and the others.

The framework of multiple dreams is so complex that walking out of the cinema at the end of the film feels like a mind game. Will you wake up to discover that you merely dreamed the film?

The film succeeds greatly at redefining and reworking the possibilities of action films and clever, Hitchcockian devices from which to present them. This seems to be Nolan’s primary intent. However, he passes up—intentionally—opportunities to explore deeper themes and complexity.

For instance, the physical reality of the dreams is quite straightforward. Occasionally a train will come out of nowhere or earthquakes will rumble as dreamers question the nature of their dreams. But, for the most part, bullets still fly fast and in straight lines. Nobody is carousing or having wild sex. The sequence of events is linear.

Few dreams are this straightforward. Yet, given the amount of action and plot, the story would completely fall apart if the dreams were as dreamy as they should be. The film, as it is, already requires a lot of exposition.

But in making this choice, the film bypasses opportunities to explore characters’ emotions in more depth and the psychological implications of the interactions between dreams and reality. For instance, dreamtime can sometimes extend weeks or years in the short span of a few hours of waking life. Dreamers should be more affected by this than they are.

But this is an action movie, and it would be challenging to explore these issues without killing the action. Yet, given Nolan’s cleverness in planning out the premise itself (he worked on it, reportedly for 10 years), we might have hoped he would have.

The film is certainly a worthwhile experience, and for a summer film, it’s easily the best of the blockbusters so far. But, oh, the potential was there for more.

“Inception” merits three out of four stars.

Can you read signs, can you read stars?  Can you make peace, can you fight war, can you milk cows even though you drive cars?  Can you survive, against all odds, now?

Cop that album, its a future classic.

Set List:

As We Enter
Tribal War
Nah Mean
Nas Is Like
Represent
Hip Hop is Dead
Sweet Dreams / If I Ruled the World
Leaders
Count Your Blessings
Dispear
Land of Promise
The Mission
More Justice
War / No More Trouble
Move
Patience
Strong Will Continue
Hate Me Now
Got Yourself a Gun
Made You Look
Welcome to Jamrock
Road to Zion
Africa Must Wake Up
One Mic
Could You Be Loved