Reception
Film critic Roger Ebert liked the film and the characters but gave it a mixed review:
| “ | The Salton Sea is all pieces and no coherent whole. Maybe life on meth is like that. The plot does finally explain itself, like a dislocated shoulder popping back into place, but then the plot is off the shelf; only the characters and details set the movie aside from its stablemates. I liked it because it was so endlessly, grotesquely, inventive: Watching it, I pictured Tarantino throwing a stick into a swamp, and the movie swimming out through the muck, retrieving it, and bringing it back with its tail wagging. | ” |
Critic Robert Koehler, writing in Variety magazine, also gave the gave the film a mixed review, writing, "The latest fashion, The Salton Sea strains past the breaking point to provide the old genre with new couture. Tyro helmer D.J. Caruso appears compelled to strut his cinematic stuff in every scene, whether called for or not, and in the process overplays his assignment."
The New York Times film critic Stephen Holden believes the film to be derivative, and wrote:
| “ | The Salton Sea, directed by D. J. Caruso from a screenplay by Tony Gayton (who also wrote the recent Murder by Numbers), blatantly recycles moods and images from other recent films and compacts them into a formula of its own. From Heat it borrows a noirish twilighted despair; from Pulp Fiction, a fondness for grotesque caricature; from Requiem for a Dream, a contortedly druggy ambience; and from Fight Club a surrealist bravado and choked-back super-macho cool. All that borrowing lends The Salton Sea style to burn but little personality of its own. | ” |
Slate film critic David Edelstein reviewed the work of actor Val Kilmer favorably, writing:
| “ | The good news is that Kilmer, a smart, nervy actor who looked to be down for the count—the victim, some have suggested, of his own untenable temperament—is in there working hard and giving a real performance. He doesn't make the movie worth seeing, but he makes me hope to see him again. | ” |
The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 62% based on reviews from 85 critics, with an average rating of 5.8 out of 10.
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
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