The Salton Sea | Review

Caruso’s debut goes down into flames.

Val Kilmer’s the trumpet-playing tattoo-wearing man with a cause provides the film’s introduction with a cool-voiced narrative comparatively reminiscent of his take as the Lizard King in Stone’s The Doors. As we gaze upon nuclear bomb footage and friendly housewife’s of the 50’s, we are then submerged into a Trainspotting-like drug laced text of the paraphernalia world of chemically challenged users and dealers. The mildly charged introduction seems to set up the film in the direction of a storyline filled with a wallpaper of zany incidents of humans sandwiched between mattresses and dreamed-up burglaries and if you haven’t read any of the reviews-you’d think that you’d end watching a junkie’s after world, but like he initially warns the viewers- and things are seldom what they seem. Yeah, right thank you for the big clue?

The clues begin to drop in a bread-crumb trial form telling us that our protagonist isn’t what he appears to be, his identity as Danny Parker, is just about as accurate as if he were named Peter Parker or better yet, Spider-Man. The neighbour next door and coffee-shop confidant in the form of Deborah Kara Unger (Crash) acts as the device to supply the back story with flashbacks of his former life, – a life that includes the perfect looking wife and beautiful days spent playing music near the sea. Apparently, they chose to waste away their days in front of the wrong sea, as it is elaborately and horribly detailed in slow-motion sequence and hinted by the inked portrait on his back. Her fate presents the viewer with enough eye-rolling moments to expose the narrative as what it really is- a weak script covered up by placing the emphasis on all of the film’s oddball characters. The performance of Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket) as Pooh-Bear-the nose-less pig-snorting dealer is repellently good, but otherwise the humour of a mock JFK super 8 killing tribute can’t hide the much foreseeable typical Charles Bronson with a major chip on his shoulder ending.

Not making up for the predictable storyline is the visual appeal of the film by cinematographer Amir Mokri. Probably his best work to date, there are some nice dark and sombre noir-ish feel sequences that skilfully contrast with a full blast desert sand-yellow. The bookend sequence of the room engulfed in flames looks damn good, maybe too good for a Tony Gayton’s script that lacks in the edge and makes for a narrative that quite simply seems like just another recycled variation of a popular Hollywood movie theme-the one about the guy-who-seeks-revenge-of-his-dead-wife. Caruso’s The Salton Sea lacks in consistency, there are some promising artsy paint strokes with the how-many-bullets-left-in-the-gun-bit, or the intro crash course on the history of drugs montage and some decent transition shots, which provide some nice eye-candy, but Caruso’s vision as a director begins and ends with these tidbits. The tacked-on ending seems a little too poetic and the Memento-inspired identity guessing game doesn’t bring out the curiosity that it should, so when the question of Tom Van Allen’s identity arises, we quite frankly don’t care what the answer is.

Rating 1.5 stars