Just Add Water

An uneasy mixture of sweet strangeness and irksome condescension, "Just Add Water" is a white-trash western that feels manipulated rather than massaged into being. Set in an H20-parched California town tyrannized by a meth-dealing punk who now owns everything, it stars Dylan Walsh as a mild-mannered parking lot attendant named Ray who immediately seems foreign to us for sticking around a place so eccentrically hellish.
Writer-director Hart Bochner is obviously tickled in a Coen brothers-style, point-and-laugh way by the kind of bruised Americana where family recipes inspire murder, an agoraphobic wife can keep an affair secret for 18 years and the opening of a gas station mini-mart is an event. But he also wants us to feel something for Ray's deferred dreams. By the time our hero has set his mind to cleaning up his town, the rousing empathy feels like too little, too late for all the forced oddity beforehand.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 28 marzo 2008