The Salton Sea is a 2002 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by D. J. Caruso and starring Val Kilmer and Vincent D'Onofrio.

His story begins with him posing as "Danny Parker", a speed freak addicted to methamphetamine, who hangs out with friends while indulging in drugs.

When he returns home, Parker sheds his clothes and his personality, and basks in his past life as trumpet player "Tom Van Allen".

He reveals to an abused neighbor named Colette that he was once happily married, only to watch as his wife was gunned down by masked thieves during a stopover at the Salton Sea.

Quincy is in fact an agent tasked with exacting vengeance for the Mexicali Boys, a leader of whom Parker turned in to the police before the events of the film's present day timeline.

[4] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and wrote: The Salton Sea is all pieces and no coherent whole.

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.

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.

[7]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.