Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
Directed by Drew Goddard
Lake Tahoe, 1969. Seven strangers, each one with a secret to bury, meet at El Royale, a decadent motel with a dark past. In the course of a fateful night, everyone will have one last shot at redemption.
54 connections found
View:
54 films that influenced Bad Times at the El Royale
What critics say influenced Bad Times at the El Royale
Tarantino set the template for this kind of self-aware homage a quarter-century ago with “Pulp Fiction” — a title that could just as easily have applied to Goddard’s all-too-familiar tribute to crime-novel archetypes and the films that immortalized them.
For his long-awaited follow-up, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” Goddard seems to have deliberately chosen to one-up himself, at least symbolically, with a film that feels at times as if it had been sitting on its own shelf for at least 22 years, right around the time when the vogue for films aping “Pulp Fiction” was at its apex and one could hardly go to a multiplex without encountering at least one twisty tale involving talkative criminals, ironic violence, unusual time structures and colorful dialogue chock-full of pop culture references galore.
First, it’s a better use of Tarantino’s signature plotting that whatever the heck last month’s Life Itself was, and secondly, at least someone has found a way to riff on newer films by that writer-director than the glut of films from the mid-90s and early 2000s that all wanted to be Pulp Fiction.
It took us 24 years, but we finally got a Pulp Fiction clone that’s worthy of standing beside the original.
You can also feel it in the dialogue scenes, which blend high stakes and mundane chatter with a sarcastic flair reminiscent of the Pulp Fiction director’s early work.
The talkier tendencies of Quentin Tarantino are an apt point of comparison here (some of the “Pulp Fiction” auteur’s stylistic proclivities come up, too).
But Goddard is up to something a little bit different than, say, “ The Hateful Eight .”
The film El Royale most evokes is Tarantino’s extremely flawed recent effort The Hateful Eight , a post–Civil War Western that threw eight strangers into a remote cabin and had them bounce off one another.
From Rope to The Hateful Eight, the concept has always been a way for directors to build tension slowly over a few hours.
Bad Times at the El Royale is Pulp Fiction meets The Hateful Eight – that is, the film has the strengths of the former and the weaknesses of the latter.
By pulling back you’ll see many structural similarities to Quentin Tarantino ‘s The Hateful Eight as well as his briefcase MacGuffin from Pulp Fiction courtesy of a bag of cash and film reel of sordid affairs.
Comparisons between El Royale and the cinema of Quentin Tarantino are perhaps inevitable, given the film’s violence, its kitschy throwback aesthetic, its ironic deployment of ‘60s pop standards, its chronology-shuffling Pulp Fiction-ish plotting and its sustained switcheroos of allegiance and chicanery (see: Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight).
The plot, which in premise bears much in common with James Mangold’s 2003 Nevada hotel thriller “Identity,” loses its enigmatic edge a little over halfway in, and many of the more likable souls perish far too soon.
Goddard depicts no issue setting a period-happy tone that’s so very mixtape worthy, adding to the aesthetic charm of this Identity riff with gangsters and Far Cry 5 undertones.
I was waiting for the revelation of something deeply sinister, perhaps even paranormal, to explain the implausible isolation of what we’re witnessing, perhaps à la Cabin in the Woods, or even the 2003 movie Identity, which unfortunately kept springing to mind; that one was also about a group of strangers oddly sequestered at a rainy neon-soaked motel.
Unlike Identity , the hotel is what unites this group of strangers, rather than an intertwined history.
A sizzling neo-noir cousin of 2003's " Identity " and 2015's "The Hateful Eight," the film sidesteps the cookie-cutter in exciting ways; as the narrative unravels, it is near-impossible to predict where things are going.
The 'hotel movie' genre is tackled here (shades of Mangold's 'Identity' and even Tarantino's 'The Hateful Eight'), as the kindly, dementia-stricken Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges) checks into the El Royale with struggling back-up singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo) waiting in back of the line; there's also shady salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a regular at the joint, and Emily (Dakota Johnson) with her hippie gear and hot-rod car, who, we soon find out, holds a bound and gagged woman (Cailee Spaeny).
Think of it like a heterosexual Clue mixed with a bisexual Reservoir Dogs, but not as fun.
Comparisons between El Royale and the cinema of Quentin Tarantino are perhaps inevitable, given the film’s violence, its kitschy throwback aesthetic, its ironic deployment of ‘60s pop standards, its chronology-shuffling Pulp Fiction-ish plotting and its sustained switcheroos of allegiance and chicanery (see: Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight).
Goddard takes a bit of Reservoir Dogs, a dash of Grindhouse, a scoop of Pulp Fiction, and a sprinkle of The Hateful Eight; tosses in a twisting timeline and characters hiding various skeletons in their closets; tops it off with a stop-in-your-tracks selection of songs; and shakes it all together in a cool, carefully selected apparatus.
There's a big dose of Reservoir Dogs in the violent-strangers-thrown-together setting, with echoes of Tarantino's later The Hateful Eight.
“Bad Times at the El Royale” is like an Agatha Christie story or one of many movies that clumsily trailed after Quentin Tarantino’s groundbreaking “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” in the 1990s.
Advertisement
Writer-director Goddard is a fascinating talent, having cut his teeth working for polar opposites J.J. Abrams (“Alias,” “Lost”) and Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel”).
Drew Goddard wrote for TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost before he started making movies, and it shows.
The director of Cabin In The Woods, TV's The Good Place and a writer of Lost, Cloverfield and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Drew Goddard's work has always combined thrills, twists, philosophical questions and a self-aware sense of humour.
This film is written and directed by Drew Goddard, who did the fantastic horror/comedy "The Cabin in the Woods" a few years back and who has written for great shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Alias" and "Lost."
Having made his bones writing for shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Alias, he went on to write 2008’s Cloverfield and co-write 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods, which he also directed.
That’s also where Erivo, a Tony winner for “The Color Purple,” who steals the show here and in the upcoming “Widows,” has her first chance to sing.
Erivo won a Tony for her performance in the recent Broadway revival of The Color Purple, but this and next month’s Widows are her first film roles.
Erivo, a Tony-winner for “The Color Purple,” is astounding, carrying a wisdom and world-weariness the others can’t manage.
And the actors always give you something to watch: Erivo is a soulful new presence in movies (she won a Tony for the stage production of “The Color Purple”), Hamm is in exuberant form and Bridges hunkers down for a sneakily sincere turn.
But it’s the spectacular Erivo, a Tony winner for The Color Purple, who takes the acting honors, throwing in a few delicious songs (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “This Old Heart of Mine”) in between demonstrations of, well … they won’t allow us to tell.
There was “Mad World” in Donnie Darko, and “Creep” in The Social Network , but if anything, Bad Times At The El Royale harkens back to an even earlier example, Striking Distance , from 1993, which used “Little Red Riding Hood” as the serial killer’s musical cue.
John Huston’s “Key Largo” is the movie that comes to mind as night falls and the rains come with it.
Stir in Psycho, Rashomon, John Huston's Key Largo, a whiff of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, and a smidgeon of Huston's Beat the Devil and assorted other what-the-hell buddy pics, notably Rat Pack items such as the original Ocean's 11 or Robin and the 7 Hoods.
Shades of All About Eve (1950) and, on a lesser scale, Key Largo (1948); that�s what I�ve been saying for years now!
Advertisement
Stir in Psycho, Rashomon, John Huston's Key Largo, a whiff of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, and a smidgeon of Huston's Beat the Devil and assorted other what-the-hell buddy pics, notably Rat Pack items such as the original Ocean's 11 or Robin and the 7 Hoods.
Goddard so deftly twists this star-laden popcorn thriller into a shrewd backdoor chronicle of nearly every terror of the ’60s — from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders, and Psycho to COINTELPRO — that it’s possible not to see the turn coming.
There’s Norman Bates spying on Room 1 in Psycho, Bruno Dumont’s French twist on it with Twentynine Palms, unfolding at a Mojave Desert lodge, and documentary The Voyeur’s Motel, based on the scuzzy-but-true story of a Colorado innkeeper who, for decades, secretly gazed down on his customers through ceiling grilles.
And why is the mousey clerk acting a lot like Norman Bates from “Psycho”?
As Jeremy Irons famously says in “Reversal of Fortune,” “You have no idea.”