Review: Bad Times at the El Royale
A man walks into a hotel room and buries a bag of money under the floorboards. Time passes, a knock on the door is heard, he opens the door and is shot dead.
Ten years later, around 1969, a priest, a vacuum salesman and a lounge singer arrive at that same retro-kitsch hotel, the now semi-abandoned El Royale, which as the unusual distinction of being in two states at the same time, with one side being in Nevada and the other in California. As we'll come to discover, neither the hotel nor its various occupants are exactly as they appear. For one thing, Laramie the salesman (Jon Hamm, doing an unctuous riff on Don Draper) turns out to be an FBI man sent to the El Royale to retrieve surveillance equipment from the honeymoon suite.
In the process, Laramie discovers that the El Royale has been doing its own surveillance, finding a secret corridor which allows him to see into the other guests' rooms. Thus he observes the priest (Jeff Bridges) going about his quiet business, singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo) rehearsing, and, shockingly, one of the other guests, a hippie chick named Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson), dragging a bound young girl into her room and strapping her to a chair. In yet another one of the film's many twists, the young girl turns out to be Rose (Cailee Spaeny), Emily's younger sister whom Emily has kidnapped in order to get her away from the clutches of charismatic cult leader, Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth, all slithery swagger). Billy Lee is none too happy about this turn of events and tracks the sisters down. It's no spoiler to say that things go from bad to worse and that the El Royale will have more blood spilled within its walls.
It's been six years since writer-director Drew Goddard made his debut with the fiendishly fun The Cabin in the Woods, and it's clear that he has not lost his capacity for cleverness. As with his previous film, Bad Times at the El Royale is more than a genre exercise; at its heart, it is essentially an encapsulation of the turbulence that defined the era. Almost every character is symbolic of a certain element, whether it be Miles the concierge (Lewis Pullman) representing the traumatised soldiers who served in Vietnam, Billy Lee recalling Charles Manson, or Darlene encountering the injustices of being both black and a woman. In one of the film's most striking scenes, she has to stay silent as a smarmy record executive (Xavier Dolan) points out how he gets paid $200 an hour whilst she receives $12 for a session no matter how long that session is.
Whilst it is enjoyable to play Goddard's meta-referential game, the film may be too ambitious in scope and narrative to be truly effective and compelling. The pacing does slacken every now and again, which can be deadly given the film's 141-minute running time. Nevertheless, the eye is engaged by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey's elegant and slightly unsettling frames-within-frames compositions, Martin Whist's production design, and the excellent performances from all the actors with especial kudos to Bridges and the superb Erivo.
Bad Times at the El Royale
Directed by: Drew Goddard
Written by: Drew Goddard
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeney, Lewis Pullman, Chris Hemsworth, Nick Offerman, Xavier Dolan, Shea Whigham, Mark O'Brien
