On the realism front, there’s certainly room for doubt, but this kind of thing is pretty standard movie fare. And, of course, there are plenty of pop psychologists ready to explain away any amount of insane behavior on the basis of childhood trauma. Apparently, being spanked can ruin you for like (ah, this explains so much).

Also, if we take a second to think about realism (which, I know, should never be talked about in a film like this) how is it realistic that young children will follow the instructions that were instilled in them in their training all the way to adulthood. Sorry, but I wanted to be Miss America and a ballerina when I was little…

patch 1:
possible reason 1: Orlov was under some watchlist (by virtue of being a Russian, not because he was a high-ranking Russian officer), so the only way to speak to her personally (he didn’t think that the other agents will be able to convince her that it’s his orders) is to “deflect”.

possible reason 2: Orlov chose to make a flash expose to draw all attention to Salt, making the CIA less likely to look elsewhere, making the already unsuspected Winter even less of a candidate for suspicion. If Salt decides to assassinate and succeeds, it’s a good thing for the Russian will arm their warheads. Even if Salt fails it wouldn’t be important, as he still has Winter. I think it’s not so important to get the Russian president killed, he’s just a side effect. What’s more important is give the CIA the jitters, so that they’ll want to have access (and they’ll have) to the US president. I think that if the situation is not tense, the US president will just have his SS agents, and there’s no reason for a CIA staff (Winter) to hang around him.

patch 2:
The president is most likely alive and unconscious, but it doesn’t matter. Neither Peabody nor Salt saw what happened in the bulletproof command centre before the authorization was done, so they couldn’t have known with certainty that the president was knocked unconscious by Winter after witnessing Winter shooting all the other guys. Remember that Salt was taken away as soon as the final troops arrived, thus there wasn’t any time for the president to wake. On the helicopter, both didn’t know that the president witnessed anything.

—

It’s interesting to note that those agents are most likely KGB agents from USSR. Now that it’s dissolved and it’s Russia, who’s the one who controls these spies if the KGB replacement agency does not inherit this unit? It appears that it could be Orlov with his deluded political thinking of destroying the US, at the expense of their own president. Perhaps he’s a communist and don’t recognize democratically elected president of Russia.

All these are just my opinions. Inaccuracies are my own.

I love reading plot holes, and I equally enjoy trying to patch them (if it can be done, and if I enjoyed that movie of course), for if it does help someone enjoy a movie retrospectively, I’ll feel good about it.

I do get the “running away” part at the end as well, though I think that she would have been better used as a fake-killed-and-resurrected member of the American Team (for some reason I’m thinking of puppets …) like John Kelly/John Clark was in the Tom Clancy novels. If her goal is to go after the other Russian sleepers, it makes sense to help her out, though I assume that’s what the Firefly bad guy whose name I can never remember will be doing in future installments. Wipe the slate clean, agree that she did some bad and some good things, and set her on the trail with a little backup instead of soaking wet in the snow. If she develops a nasty chest cold, that could really slow her down.

Plot holes are different, because they involve suspension of intelligence or memory, not just disbelief. It\s not impossible to write a coherent story that involves betrayal and duplicity and so on and so on – authors do it all the time. Maybe the folks writing movies aren’t always in the same class, or maybe writing by committee has these drawbacks, but other movies have done it. Granted, the ones that pop into mind were books first, so maybe that says something …

Back to the first (“why burn her”) hole, as that seems to be generating most of the comments – after all the back-and-forth, I’m still no clearer on it. If they doubted her sincerity, as I agree they did (the later dialog about her not having supposed to get married, for example), it still doesn’t make sense to test her sincerity by doing the most likely thing to turn her against them (killing her husband, and right in front of her too). Later on we realize that she was planning to double-cross them already, but wasn’t that likely to bring on a killing spree in anyone not stone-cold-sleeper? If they doubted her, that just doesn’t seem like a workable test.