Derivative, predictable, and dull
There is something about hotels that I find very romantic. You get to try on a different life in a hotel. You're usually in a new place when you're staying in a hotel. There's something about the experience that allows you to be a different person. You can think to yourself: "Oh, this is what it would look if I were in Paris. This is what it would look like if I were in New York." There's something about it that transports you somewhere and that, I suppose, has always been good for creativity and imagination. I love the entire spectrum of hotels, b__ecause for a creative person, it's about trying on a new life. For the El Royale, I liked this idea of a hotel that had a shadier side to it.
- Drew Goddard; "Exclusive Bad Times At The El Royale Interview With Drew Goddard" (Simon Gallagher); WhatCulture (October 9, 2018)
Following the genre-bending, utterly insane, and extremely funny The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Bad Times at the El Royale is the second feature from writer/director Drew Goddard, who has also accrued writing credits for Matt Reeves's Cloverfield (2008), Marc Foster's World War Z (2013), and Ridley Scott's The Martian (2015), as well as TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996-2003), Angel (1999-2004), Alias (2001-2006), and Lost (2004-2010). In short, he has an impressive résumé. As it stands in relation to Cabin, Bad Times is a similarly stylised cine-literate genre mash-up. However, whereas in Cabin, the twist upon twist upon twist had a cumulative effect, with the story getting better the longer it went on and the weirder things got, in Bad Times it's a case of ever diminishing returns. By the time we reach the end of the lengthy 141-minute runtime (more on that later), with everything and everyone shoehorned into neatly explained niches, the film has been shorn of its vitality, leaving one with an overriding impression of "meh". If Cabin was a genuinely new spin on a clichéd old story, playing with and subverting genre at every turn, Bad Times is singularly unable to free itself from the most oppressively derivative of its generic constraints.
Set in 1969, the film takes place almost entirely in the titular El Royale Hotel (actually a motel, and obviously inspired by the Cal Neva Lodge & Casino), a once popular but now fading novelty spot situated half in Nevada and half in California, with a line literally running down the centre of the property to delineate the border. To say too much about the plot or characters would be to ruin some of the twists (which is ultimately all the film really has going for it), but the basic set-up is that over the course of one night, seven people will encounter one another but not all seven will leave. There's Fr. Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a Catholic priest on the way to see his brother; Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), a singer travelling to a job she doesn't want; Emily (Dakota Johnson), an intensely private woman who wants nothing to do with any of the others; Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a slick vacuum cleaner salesman; Rose (Cailee Spaeny), who appears to be Emily's kidnap victim; Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a cult leader obviously based on Charles Manson; and Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman), the motel's receptionist/bellhop/maid/barman/manager. As the night wears on, it becomes apparent that not only are few of these people who they claim to be, but the motel itself is hiding its own dark secrets.
If that set-up reminds you a little of James Mangold's Identity (2003), you're not completely off course. Bad Times shares very similar DNA, at least up to the point where Identity goes totally batshit crazy; both are set in an out-of-the-way motel where a group of strangers are trapped overnight, and all, or some of them aren't who they appear, with the audience slowly filled in on their backstories via flashbacks. However, whereas Identity failed because the last half-hour is patently ridiculous, completely undermining the excellent build-up of tension and mystery, Bad Times has the exact opposite problem – the conclusion is decidedly underwhelming, failing to build on an excellent set-up, with the last twenty minutes or so lapsing into utter mundanity, and, most unforgivably for a mystery film, twists for twist's sake. The structure also somewhat recalls Lost (a disparate group of strangers forced together at a mysterious location filled with secrets, whilst a flashback-heavy narrative fills us in on who these people are), and, perhaps more obviously, the high-concept, perspective-shifting, often achronological Pulp Fiction (1994) imitators of the late 90s; films such as John Herzfeld's 2 Days in the Valley (1996), Peter O'Fallon's Suicide Kings (1998), and Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints (1999).
To start on a positive note though, Bad Times looks terrific – as you would expect from veteran cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours; We Need to Talk About Kevin; Nocturnal Animals), the photography is faultless, whilst the production design by Martin Whist (Down with Love; Devil; Super 8) and the art direction by Michael Diner (Firewall; Night at the Museum; Redacted) are superb, with the ultra tacky period detail dripping off the screen. Directorally, Goddard also has his moments with some eye-catching compositions, locked-off cameras, POV shots, and lengthy single-take Steadicam sequences. However, it's in relation to this last point where one of the film's most immediate problems is to be found – the solid directorial work is completely out of step with the vapid writing, as if a screenplay intended for Michael Bay ended up being directed by Michael Mann (although Goddard is certainly no Mann). The barely-there storyline seems to be nothing other than a hangar onto which to drape a tone and style, rather than generating that style.
Perhaps in relation to this disparity between style and story, the film's second strongest sequence is the opening scene. Shot entirely from a fixed camera position, and looking for all the world like a stage play, the scene is completely wordless, and charts the course of several hours in one of the motel rooms, as a man whose face we never clearly see checks in, moves all of the furniture to one side of the room, pulls up the floorboards, hides a bag under them, places them back, puts all the furniture back, relaxes for a while, and is promptly shot dead. The scene is a masterclass in slow-burning tension – we know something bad is going to happen, but Goddard refuses to pull the trigger prematurely, so when the violence does erupt, it's a pseudo-cathartic moment for the audience (incidentally, the film's best sequence is similarly abstract, slowly plotted, and mostly sans dialogue, but as it involves the discovery of an important and unexpected location within the motel, to say any more would be a spoiler). The problem is that the heavily stylised and brilliantly directed opening is so good, it spoils the audience, establishing a tone to which the rest of the film mostly fails to live up.
In direct contrast to the opening, the ending is both narratively and directorally formulaic, predicable, and trite, with the least compelling and well fleshed out character taking centre stage, mano-a-mano good guy/bad guy dialogue aplenty, and even a ludicrous shoot-out. The whole things smacks of "been there, seen that a million times." Additionally, whereas the opening is effortlessly enthralling and distinctive, as the film lumbers on, and Goddard begins to run out of directorial tricks, there are sequences which scream "look how cool I am." For example, Billy Lee whirling toward the camera, eating pie, shirt agape, hair soaking wet, dancing to the sounds of Deep Purple's cover of "Hush" (1968) is so desperate to become iconic that it instead comes across as self-parody.
Another significant problem is that the characters all feel like generic archetypes ripped out of other films, with none giving the impression of being a real-person, with their own agency and interiority. They are, in essence, walking plot-points. The script is also exceptionally weak in how it handles exposition (of which there is a significant amount). There seems to have been little attempt to organically introduce heavily expositional scenes, or integrate them with the surrounding material. Instead, on several occasions, the plot literally stops whilst characters explain things to one another. A particularly bad example of this is when Flynn and Sweet arrive at the motel reception. Sullivan is already there, and begins to tell them the inner workings of the establishment, having stayed there numerous times in the past. Then Miller turns up, and begins to recite a rehearsed sales pitch. Simply trading exposition from one character to another doesn't mean it's not exposition – the scene is painfully slow, dull, and pointless, telling us precious little that we actually need to know. Indeed the entire issue of the motel being bi-state is strangely pointless. Aside from the novelty value, it is never factored into the narrative, and one wonders why Goddard set the film in such a specific location if he had no plans to use that specificity thematically.
A final problem which must be discussed is that 141-minute runtime. Padded, and massively self-indulgent, there is enough narrative content to barely fill a 90-minute duration. One of the most egregious missteps in this respect is Goddard's tendency to ponderously play out the same scene from multiple points of view, but in such a way as to give the audience only a smidgeon of additional information, so by the third time we're seeing a scene (which was too long even the first time around), it becomes an endurance test. Also, with this runtime and so little content, needless to say, the bottom falls out of the film entirely during the middle section, as things become unrelentingly slow and contrived. Goddard seems to equate curiosity about who the characters are with filmic suspense, meaning things take a decided turn for the mundane long before the underwhelming dénouement. The interesting set-up earns him a fair bit of wiggle room in relation to this, but he abuses it, pushing the audience far beyond the point where they simply give up caring about anything on screen. And when he finally does get around to wrapping things up, the last few twists are nowhere near enough of a reward. Personally, I was left feeling that the mysteries were more rewarding than the explanations.
Part 1930s-style pulp fiction, part 1940s and 50s-style film noir, and part 1960s-style paranoid thriller, the film flirts with a few themes (redemption, forgiveness, karma, political corruption, the seductive nature of power), but none get off the starting grid, and ultimately, Bad Times isn't really about anything. Hyper self-aware, and attempting to both subvert and celebrate generic conventions, Goddard seems to think he has a bonafide epic on his hands, a portent piece of celluloid mastery which samples the best of hard-boiled crime fiction, and imparts valuable lessons in the process. He doesn't. It's more self-indulgent folly than paean of universal truth. And it's painfully dull.