Review: 'Salton Sea' a briny, bloody mess

Regurgitated, ersatz Tarantino

(CNN) -- Though it's superbly photographed, D.J. Caruso's "The Salton Sea" is yet another calculated wallow in scum, drugs, and bullets that makes Quentin Tarantino-weened audience members feel like they're in the presence of Greatness.

A lot of people have been comparing its tricky storyline to last year's "Memento," but take that with a full shaker of salt. Caruso is much more interested in rubbing our faces in speed-freak filth than he is in conveying the plot.

In fact, you don't even sense that there is a plot until half-way through the movie, at which point most people will be feeling stickier than the theater floor. If you're determined to see this one, don't forget to bring a soapy washcloth.

Val Kilmer, whose zoned-out screen presence perfectly suits the character he's portraying, is Danny Parker, a crystal-meth addicted lowlife with an enormous Grim Reaper tattooed on his back, a bit of overstatement that's offset by the quaint hot-rod flames tattooed on his arms. We quickly learn that there's more to Danny than meets the eye, via a beat poet voice-over that also fills us in on the twisted history of methamphetamine.

Danny, it turns out, may also be Tom Van Allen, a jazz trumpet player who used to have a beautiful, loving wife. It's up to us to figure out exactly who Danny/Tom is and what he's up to -- not that the answer, when it finally comes, is particularly plausible.

Drugs, pistols and harpoons

RESOURCES EW.com: All about 'The Salton Sea'

Caruso spends the first 45 or so minutes establishing the milieu, which is to say you have to watch numerous lowlifes repeatedly ingest narcotics, the monotony of which is broken only when someone starts waving a pistol -- or, in one instance, a loaded harpoon.

Tom and his speeding cronies -- including his loyal best buddy, Jimmy (Peter Sarsgaard) -- stay up for days on end, rattling off insane plans for the next big score while their backlog of dope shrinks down to nothing.

This is the kind of movie where you're not surprised to see an old man in a wheelchair singing "Walk on the Wild Side," karaoke style. There's also a woman suffocating under a mattress during an exceptionally deranged drug deal, which serves no purpose beyond being another thing that's unpleasant to see.

It's not that you get the idea quickly -- you got the idea about 40 or 50 movies ago. Drugs are bad, you see, but when like-minded people spend their days and nights taking them in mass quantities, pretty much any sort of behavior is acceptable. If a director shoots the squalor luxuriously enough, you're supposed to think a significant point is being made.

Nosing around

Val Kilmer (right) stars in "The Salton Sea."

Danny eventually starts ratting out his suppliers to a pair of mean-spirited undercover cops (Anthony LaPaglia and Doug Hutchison). He seems to recognize that he's traveling a dead-end street, but a lot of information has gone unspoken at this point, so it's really not that easy.

When the cops inform him that he's been marked for death by a drug gang and should probably get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible, Danny devises an elaborate plan to buy $250,000 worth of speed from a desert-dwelling, bizarro dope dealer named Pooh Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio). Pooh Bear has done so much "blow" over the years, he doesn't have a nose anymore. Instead, he glues a beige plastic triangle to his face.

This is where the unconvinced will have had enough, regardless of any lingering mystery about Danny. D'Onofrio, whose over-the-top-and-then-some performance resembles a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove," can be an effective actor when he wants to be. He just doesn't want to be as often as he should, and there's nothing in Pooh Bear to convince him otherwise. He all but yodels his dialogue, threatens the sanctity of Kilmer's private parts with a rabid badger, and pretends that he's eating a former enemy's brains for lunch.

The movie as a whole seems desperate for attention, but D'Onofrio closely resembles a self-satisfied method actor wildly waving his arms at the audience. Next time he should set his head on fire and throw firecrackers.

You get it all in "The Salton Sea": monumental drug use, profanity, a man burning to death, suffocation, blood, beatings, shootings, and, of course, that nasty badger. There's also a fantasy sequence in which several druggies invade a hospital and steal one of Bob Hope's stool samples. Any resemblance to "Casablanca" is purely coincidental.