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THE SALTON SEA Send This Review to a Friend
Revenge and drugs are at the root of "The Salton Sea," a murky, violent and hardly pleasurable film that takes its hero Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) through a hazy maze of highs and lows. If you want to wallow in the stuff, go ahead.
It isn't that the film is badly made. Under the direction of D. J. Caruso from a screenplay by Tony Gayton, "The Salton Sea," set in California, does what it is supposed to do. It's a question of whether one gives a damn. Danny is on a mission to avenge the death of his wife (Chandra West), slaughtered in a killing related to the world of drugs, the one of choice in this saga being crystal methamphetamine. The story is told in flashback from the introduction to Danny as he sits in a stupor and plays his trumpet amid wreckage and fire.
What unfolds takes Danny on a course that involves narcotics agents and dealers, informing, persistent danger and encounters with characters you wouldn't want to spend much time with, including Vincent D'Onofrio hamming it up as Pooh-Bear, a whacked- out sadistic drug kingpin, whose idea of fun is to try to ring confessions or inflict punishment by placing a man's privates near a hungry, caged badger.
Kilmer goes through the required paces with solemnity, relating occasionally to a loyal friend (Peter Sarsgaard) and a woman in trouble (Deborah Kara Unger). But you'll find very little humanity in this relentlessly ugly story. A Warner Brothers and Castle Rock Entertainment release.
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