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Val Kilmer’s got the need for speed in The Salton Sea
by MARK SLUTSKY
 It’s
hard to tell, at least for the first 45 minutes, whether The Salton
Sea, a neonoirish crime drama featuring Val Kilmer as an avenging crystal
meth freak and occasional trumpet player, is really taking itself seriously.
In a cartoony sort of way it’s watchable in its slick badness—for
a while, anyway. Then it gets all solemn and redemptive and you can
tell its number’s already up.
The movie’s directed by D.J. Caruso, a music video guy, in his
feature debut, and you can tell he digs David Fincher’s stuff a
little too much, another video guy turned movie director. There’s
the atmosphere of Seven, the self-aware gimmickry of Fight Club, and
while some of it is fun—the little mini-documentary at the beginning
about the history of crystal meth is sort of punchy—there’s
not too much of a movie here.
The story, as it were, has Kilmer as a former jazz musician once happily
married to the gorgeous, model-like Liz (Chandra West), until a fateful
day at the titular Sea (which is apparently a symbolically potent salt-water
body in California). Vacationing at this cheery spot, the couple is
surprised by some masked baddies who kill everyone except our forlorn
jazzbo. Soon the poor broken dude’s been turned on to crystal meth
and spends his time “tweaking” on “gack,” (as the
kids seem to be saying these days) in a treacherous criminal underground.
And a beautiful one at that; this is one of those movies where everything
is exquisitely down-and-out, like a highly stylized comic book. This
worked in Seven, but with a plot as silly as The Salton Sea’s behind
it (there are a lot of amazing twists, trust me), and with nothing else
at all going for it, it tires quickly. Kilmer’s okay, and he certainly
seems to give his all, but there’s only so much you can do with
a part that requires you to wear a fedora and play a soulful trumpet
in a burning house, as he seems to do with alarming regularity. At least
it’s not a saxophone. :
The Salton
Sea opens Friday, May 17
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