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Salton Sea, The
Warner Bros.
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for strong violence, drug use, language and some sexuality
Starring
Val Kilmer,
Vincent D'Onofrio,
Adam Goldberg,
Luis Guzmán,
Doug Hutchison,
Anthony LaPaglia,
Peter Sarsgaard,
and
Deborah Unger
After witnessing the murder of his wife, a man (Kilmer) goes undercover to avenge her death.
| GENRE(S): |
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Tony Gayton
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
D.J. Caruso
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: September 10, 2002
Video: September 10, 2002
Theatrical: April 26, 2002
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
103 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
80
New Times (L.A.)
Luke Y. Thompson
As a gallery of the grotesque, however, the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Coleman painting or Adam Parfrey publication, The Salton Sea is a blast.
75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
Strikes out toward freakishly original territory after all. Fans of the off-beat, your movie has arrived.
75
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme.
75
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.
75
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream."
75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Unlike in many thrillers, the movie doesn't sandbag us with one last, cheap twist at the end. The Salton Sea contains its share of surprises, but none of them feels forced or artificial.
70
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
It's Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, a drug lord who's snorted so much meth his nose had to be replaced by a plastic one, who kicks ass.
67
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
For all its faults, is a solid piece of dirty work.
63
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
Might be thought of as "Memento" for people who didn't get "Memento."
63
Boston Globe
Sam Allis
A commercial Hollywood movie without pretensions. If there's no art here, it's still a good yarn - which is nothing to sneeze at these days.
50
LA Weekly
Manohla Dargis
The Salton Sea isn't without interest or ideas, though some of the better ones are cribbed from David Fincher and, especially, Martin Scorsese.
50
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.
50
Chicago Tribune
Robert K. Elder
Sacrificing content for style, Caruso gives us a lot to look at but little to ponder.
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Ray Conlogue
It uses violence as a drug, injecting it into the audience and hoping to addict it. Once the dependence is created, it is simple to feed it with formulaic films.
50
Washington Post
Hank Stuever
Adheres to the whacked notion that Hollywood does drugs so the rest of us don't have to.
50
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
The more the picture reveals, the less interesting it gets, transforming its hero from an intriguing mystery man into a standard-issue screen vigilante -- and steadily upping the violence, complete with harrowing torture scenes, in a lame effort to keep our juices flowing.
42
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The cumulative effect of the movie is repulsive and depressing.
40
Village Voice
Michael Atkinson
Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.
40
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
It's been a month since I attended a preview, and I'm more grateful than sorry that I no longer remember it well. Drug thrillers and revenge plots bore me.
38
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
A truly baffling late entry in the "Pulp Fiction" sweepstakes that ends up drowning in its own pretensions -- along with, quite possibly, what's left of Val Kilmer's movie career.
30
Variety
Robert Koehler
This extremely plot-thickened tale finally offers little more than the usual genre elements pushed to the kind of extremes that recall the acrid "The Way of the Gun."
30
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility.
30
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.
30
Film Threat
Patrick Starkey
Regardless of the poison of choice, I'm always a little miffed when an actor onscreen is supposedly on a specific drug but too lazy to learn what the actual side-effects are.
30
Time
Richard Schickel
Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.
30
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.
25
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.
20
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.
20
Slate
David Edelstein
Let's just say that in spite of its malignant sun-scorched palette, absurdist visions, and narrative loop the loops, the picture looks in hindsight like the same old vigilante crap.
20
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.
 The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 22 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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