The Salton Sea

Release Date: April 26, 2002

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

41	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 30 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

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. Read full review

Rene Rodriguez

Strikes out toward freakishly original territory after all. Fans of the off-beat, your movie has arrived. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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."

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.

Staff (Not credited)

For all its faults, is a solid piece of dirty work. Read full review

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. Read full review

Jack Mathews

Might be thought of as "Memento" for people who didn't get "Memento."

Robert K. Elder

Sacrificing content for style, Caruso gives us a lot to look at but little to ponder. Read full review

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. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineMaitland 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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

Hank Stuever

Adheres to the whacked notion that Hollywood does drugs so the rest of us don't have to. Read full review

William Arnold

The cumulative effect of the movie is repulsive and depressing. Read full review

Michael Atkinson

Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

Desson Thomson

Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility. Read full review

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.

Stephen Holden

Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre. Read full review

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. Read full review

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."

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. Read full review

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.

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. Read full review

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. Read full review