OCTOBER 18, 2018
It doesn’t happen very often.
At this time of the year, most of the films that will be released before the end of the year have been screened, and film followers have a pretty good idea of what’s going to be good and what’s not.
What doesn’t show up on that scale is what’s delightful and absolutely nuts.
Welcome to “Bad Times at the El Royale.”
Writer/director Drew Goddard’s second film is every bit as nervy as his debut, 2012’s “The Cabin in the Woods.” In that film, Goddard deconstructed the slasher film by having the actions of the film’s protagonists controlled by characters played by Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins and Emmy winner Bradley Whitford.
Six years later, Goddard has come up with his second film, and it was worth the wait. “Bad Times at the El Royale” takes on another genre, but this time a much narrower one — the films of Quentin Tarantino. There are chapter headings, gratuitous violence and a gathering of eccentric characters in one room to talk everything out — kind of a mix of “Pulp Fiction” and “The Hateful Eight.”
And like Tarantino, there’s a certain theatricality to Goddard’s style. That theatricality, in fact, is evident in the film’s silent prologue as it is shot like a stage play with an overly large downstage area. A man (Nick Offerman of “Parks and Recreation”), wearing a fedora and carrying an oversized pistol, enters a hotel room holding a valise. He rolls up the carpet, pulls up the floorboards and deposits the valise beneath. Then he meets his maker.
The film picks up ten years later, and the theatricality continues. Four guests gather in the lobby of the El Royale, a once-luxurious motel on the California/Nevada border. (Half of the motel is in California where you can drink, the other half is in Nevada, where you can gamble.)
And what a quartet! There’s Southern vacuum salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), soul singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), mysterious woman Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson) and Catholic priest Fr. Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), and the four await the appearance of the motel’s mild-mannered and sole employee Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman).
Once the guests are settled in their rooms, vacuum salesman Sullivan jimmies open a lock behind the front desk and steps into a corridor that allows strangers to look through a two-way mirror into each room. As he flips on the audio of Darlene as she rehearses, singing The Isley Brothers’ “This Old Heart of Mine” (The Isley Brothers become a character point in the plot — it’s that kind of film), Sullivan watches Fr. Flynn dismantling the floorboards in his room, while Emily drags in a bound-and-gagged woman who turns out to be her sister Rose (Cailee Spaeny).
The seventh member of our little troupe makes a spectacular entrance, sashaying through the rain with his white shirt unbuttoned (see above) and displaying his abs in all their glory. He is the charismatic sadist Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth, never sexier), a cult leader who has arrived to retrieve something that he says is really his. (That something would be Rose.)
I had no idea where “Bad Times at the El Royale” would lead me, and that hasn’t happened to me at a movie in a long time. And that made me just giddy with delight. Offer me sudden bursts of unexpected violence set largely to a Motown and R&B beat, and “El Royale” had me from the get-go.
The quality of the performances are almost beside the point. Johnson and Spaeny are fine as the sisters, and Pullman is quite a find as the concierge with a boatload of secrets. But it’s the film’s veterans who are the ones who shine most brightly. Hamm lives up to his name with his Foghorn Leghorn accent as the vacuum salesman, Bridges appears to be having a blast as a priest with a secret, and Hemsworth is simply sex on a stick while shimmying his way into our hearts (or some other body part).
But the film’s best performance is by Erivo, heartbreaking as the former backup singer who is now forced to become a lounge act in second-class casinos. Amid this collection of nutjobs, her Darlene becomes the audience’s surrogate in trying to make her way through the surprising events of this long, strange night, and she manages it beautifully.
However by “long strange night,” I do mean long. If there is a problem with “Bad Times at the El Royale,” it’s the film’s 141-minute running time that can drag, especially in the film’s overly-gabby third act. Love me some Chris Hemsworth, but his dangerous presence would have been a lot more menacing if he talked less and threatened more.
Still, no matter how long that the movie may be, films this original don’t come along all that often, and “Bad Times at the El Royale” is a treat almost all the way through. I will grant you that the movie may not be to everyone’s taste, but if you’re looking for a film experience that you may never have had before, I would definitely suggest checking into the “El Royale.”
GRADE: B+
