The Salton Sea is a highly original and entertaining look at the lives of crystal meth addicts that can't quite free itself from the run-of-the-mill revenge tale it's trapped in. For every completely new character or scene, there's one taken from Cop Film 101. It's a sort of rollercoaster ride through the salvaged wreckage of a hundred similar movies. At the center are two very good but completely different performances: Val Kilmer as the main character, Danny/Tony, who is an addict with a plan; and Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, one of the most original characters I've seen in a long time.

The plot is a labyrinth of broken allegiances and betrayals, but I'll try to summarize. Kilmer plays a junkie who works as an informant for two cops. He finds out that the Mexican mob is after him for ratting on them, so he has to make a big score to get the money he needs to disappear. He seeks out a rich Asian cowboy, Bubba (B.D. Wong), and the biggest dealer in town, Pooh-Bear. But Danny has a secret, and the plot has more twists than your average strand of DNA.

Kilmer gives one of his best performances as Danny/Tony, who lost his wife in a drug-related shooting and ironically turned to drugs to bury his pain. For much of the film, we see Danny, the strung-out loser who can barely complete a sentence or figure out what time of day it is. But once in a while, and it's a welcome surprise every time, Tony comes out, the grieving husband, the educated man who plays the trumpet. It even seems to surprise him when it happens, as in a great scene where he avoids getting into a fight with his neighbor's boyfriend (Luis Guzman) by changing the subject to the man's boots. The film opens with Danny playing his trumpet in his burning apartment, piles of flaming money swirling around him as a voiceover ask us if we know who he really is, Danny or Tony. I didn't really like the narration because it provided unnecessary commentary and sometimes did that 1940s trick where it comments on what you see onscreen ("so-and-so doesn't realize that..."). However, it only appears at the beginning and during the regrettable ending.

Vincent D'Onofrio is nothing short of mesmerizing: he has created a completely original character, a frightening and sadly pitiful creature who wears a plastic nose because his drug addiction has destroyed his original nose. He seems to operate on a plane far from reality but connected enough that he can snap back into scary lucidity in a heartbeat. The character traits the writer piled on Pooh-Bear are a heavy load (for instance, he keeps a hungry badger in a cage to torture informants), but D'Onofrio manages to turn him into a real human being, plastic nose and re-enactments of the JFK assassination using pigeons tied to a remote control car notwithstanding.

There is a beggar's banquet of interesting smaller characters, most notably Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), Kilmer's adoring sidekick who loves his friend enough to have his face tattooed on his bicep. Deborah Kara Unger is underused as Kilmer's neighbor, but at least they didn't try to develop her into a big and false love interest. Luis Guzman makes the most of his two or three scenes. The cops, Anthony LaPaglia and Doug Hutchison, are not developed enough to be really interesting (LaPaglia is surly, and Hutchison calls everyone "dog," which is the extent of their characterization). B. D. Wong turns in a funny but one-note performance as the Asian drug buyer with the southern accent.

As with many movies like this, the ending is a train wreck. There is a point in the film where you will know that the film should end, but it drags on, trying to wrap up loose ends that could stay loose, and trying to tie the film back into its opening scene. Because the ending betrays the rest of the film, I think they should have just rewritten the beginning so they wouldn't have had to return there. The ending is the triumph of the routine cop movie over the unique elements in the story. The movie was still good, but the ending left a bad taste in my mouth.