While playing the trumpet in a burning room, the protagonist's voice is heard in narration. His story begins with him posing as "Danny Parker", a speed freak addicted to methamphetamine, who hangs out with friends while indulging in drugs. He also moonlights as an informant for two corrupt cops, Gus Morgan and Al Garcetti. He is trying to set up a large meth score with notorious drug dealer Pooh Bear, an eccentric psychopath who lost his nose to excessive snorting of "gak" (meth), while also attempting to set up a sting operation for Morgan and Garcetti.
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.
When meeting with Pooh Bear, Parker becomes fearful of Pooh Bear's displays of bizarre homicidal behavior, so he tapes a gun to the bottom of a table.
Parker's parents-in-law track him down, believing he has sunk into depression after his wife's death, but he tells them he does not want their help. As the deal approaches, it becomes known that Parker is not only working for the police but FBI agents working to take down Morgan and Garcetti, who have committed multiple murders. It is also revealed that they were the men who killed his wife and wounded him as they robbed a drug dealer. Parker had started his own investigation when he found out who Morgan was and delved into the drug underworld to become a believable junkie.
On the night of the deal, Parker, with the help of his best friend Jimmy, leads the FBI to the wrong location. Meanwhile, Parker arrives at Pooh Bear's house. At the dinner table, surrounded by Pooh Bear's armed friends, tensions rise and one of Pooh Bear's men tries to kill Parker, who retrieves the gun he stashed earlier and shoots the rest of the gang. Shot in the chest by Pooh Bear, Parker collapses to the floor.
Pooh Bear, wounded in the leg, goes to take a shot of meth while mumbling incoherently. Morgan and Garcetti arrive, find the massacre, and Garcetti kills Pooh Bear, whose drug-filled hypo drops to the floor. Garcetti is then killed by Parker, whose life was saved by a bulletproof vest. Morgan is shot twice by Parker, who reveals to Morgan that he knows he murdered his wife. Morgan manages to snatch Parker's gun away, but finds it empty. Parker finds Pooh Bear's syringe on the floor and plunges it into Morgan's neck, then picks up a pistol and briefly contemplates suicide, but then shoots Morgan several times and flees.
Back in his apartment, he dons his Tom Van Allen identity again but is shot by Colette's "boyfriend", Quincy. 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. Collette says she was forced to betray Parker because her daughter was being held hostage. The room catches fire, and Parker plays one more tune on his trumpet before passing out.
He regains consciousness to find that Jimmy has saved him from the fire and taken him to a hospital. After he recovers, he leaves the city, and the identities of Parker and Van Allen, behind.
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.[5]
Critic Robert Koehler, writing in Variety magazine, also 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."[6]
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.[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. He doesn't make the movie worth seeing, but he makes me hope to see him again.[8]
As of July 2022[update], the film holds a 63% approval rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 84 reviews with an average rating of 5.78 out of 10. The site's consensus states: "A slick Tarantino-inspired movie that is not for everyone."[9]
