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Review by Susan Granger
1 star out of 4
In the opening scene of this dark crime thriller, Danny Parker (Val
Kilmer) is sitting alone, playing the trumpet, in a room ablaze with fire. In a
"Don't give up on me yet" voice-over plea, he begins a confessional, explaining
who he is - and isn't - and how his wife (Chandra West) was brutally shot by
masked killers simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and how he
was unable to protect her. The crime took place at the Salton Sea in Southern
California's steamy Imperial Valley. Obsessed by guilt and vengeance, Danny
becomes a "tweaker," plunging into a seedy netherworld of addicts hooked on
crystal methamphetamine. While he makes money as a police informant, feeding
information to undercover narcotics agents (Anthony La Paglia, Doug Hutchinson),
he's also working as a middle-man in a lucrative drug deal. Written by Tony
Gayton, the plot twists and turns and, suffice it to say, nothing is what it
seems - but that still doesn't make these scummy, repugnant - ultimately tragic
- characters worth spending two hours with. For example, there's one lunatic
who's determined to heist Bob Hope's stool sample to sell on E-Bay and another,
named Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), who has snorted so much meth that he now
has a plastic nose. He graphically threatens Danny that his private parts could
become snack food for a hungry badger named Capt. Steubing. Val Kilmer hurls
himself into the film noir persona of the tattooed speed-freak, encouraged by
novice director D.J. Caruso, who seems bewitched by the euphoric intensity of
extreme degradation. But it's all a nasty, phony fraud, including Kilmer's
trumpet playing which was dubbed by jazz hornman Terence Blanchard. On the
Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Salton Sea" is a stylized but singularly
repulsive 3. It's a perilous trip.
Copyright © 2002 Susan Granger
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