The Salton Sea

Wilderness. Visually captivating in the mold of 8MM. One of Val Kilmer’s best roles and a parade of extraordinarily wacky bad guys – the noseless Vincent D’Onofrio properly turned my stomach. But The Salton Sea stumbles somewhere along the way. The pseudo-artsy visual interludes (the trumpeter, the sea, the tree) have no place in it and, at the same time, the harmony between the incessantly dynamic form and the powerfully psychological content is creaky. In this respect, Joel Schumacher was better, as he remained firmly in the psychological and escalated the dynamics only in selected scenes so that he didn’t drown in them. (15.02.2003)

SAlton Sea is not flawless and certainly not groundbreaking film. It is just a well-made genre film with a functional script and a range of interesting fully-fledged characters. When attempting psychological artistic images, the film treads on very uncertain ground, but fortunately the criminal storyline with a series of wild tragicomic camera trips into the bizarre drug addict community prevails. Val Kilmer delivers a good performance, Deborah Unger's acting is reliable, and the repugnant criminal characters created by D'Onofrio and Guzmán create a cocktail that can satisfy even the most demanding film fan. Overall impression 75%. (30.04.2007)

A visually stunning film, but one that lags behind its much stronger and denser brethren in terms of content (8MM, Requiem for a Dream, etc.). (11.07.2004)