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| photo courtesy of pieuvre.ca |
The destinies of seven
strangers collide in Bad Times at the El
Royale, a neo-noir crime thriller written and directed by Drew Goddard (The Martian, Cabin in the Woods). Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), Darlene
Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), Laramie Sullivan (Jon Hamm), Emily Summerspring (Dakota
Johnson), Rose (Cailee Spaeny), and Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth) all descend on the
El Royale hotel—situated on the California-Nevada border—for one fateful night.
Together with the lonesome hotel concierge (Lewis Pullman), the guests find
themselves caught up in a web of mystery, melodrama, and murder.
Bad Times at the El Royale is a clever, stylish, star-studded throwback to
ole-fashioned mystery fiction. It’s part Tarantino (title cards, ensemble cast,
nonlinear structure) and part Agatha Christie novel (minus Hercule Poirot). Throw
in a neo-noir, neon-splashed aesthetic, and you’ve got a solid recipe for
cinema goodness.
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| photo courtesy of digg.com |
Goddard’s script
establishes an intriguing premise: take seven strangers, each with their own
haunted past and secretive plot, and throw them into a hotel together. It’s not
an exceptionally visionary premise,
but it’s one that naturally engages the audience’s curiosity. We want to know
who these people (really) are, and we want to know what brings them to this particular
hotel on this particular night. And as Bad
Times’s story develops, the haunted pasts and the secretive plots only get
darker, more complicated, more twisty-turny.
Bad Times
is great to look at, too. The movie inhabits an immersive visual world, a stylized,
60s-retro microcosm with plenty of neon signage and groovy get-ups. It helps
that the movie populates that world with a cast of beautiful, charismatic
actors. Bad Times gives each of them
the chance to make a splash, but Bridges and Erivo make the most memorable
impressions. Hemsworth, for his part, gets a rather exciting entrance.
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| photo courtesy of observer.com |
Occasionally, the
script shifts gears and sprinkles in some social commentary. It’s never quite heavyhanded,
and it gives Bad Times a bit more substance
to match its style. It also keeps things moving in places (especially in the
third act), where the movie’s overlong runtime starts to make itself known.
FINAL VERDICT: Bad Times at the El Royale delivers on
its promise with a well-orchestrated series of dark genre thrills.
Bad Times at the El Royale is rated R.
TRAILER
Watch the trailer here.
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| photo courtesy of vox.com |
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