2010's Watch: Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)

Watched:  06/29/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Writer/ Director:  Drew Goddard

It's possible in fifteen or twenty years, this movie will be found and puzzled over as featuring folks who are now established stars, mixed with longtime stars.  Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) features Cynthia Erivo in what I will say should have been a break-out performance and her entree into film stardom, rather than waiting til Wicked.  Lewis Pullman is here.  As are Chris Hemsworth, John Hamm, Jeff Bridges and a not-50 Shades-ing Dakota Johnson.  

But this movie came out and tanked.  That's neither here nor there, but it has meant that it's not exactly on the forefront of people's minds as few eyes saw the movie in the theater and it's not found an audience on home video. 

What's odd is that Metacritic comes in at a mid-range-ish 60, and the audience score is a generous 71.  And yet... no one saw this.

However, maybe in the same way of The Last of Sheila from 1973, it will find an audience that will make sure it has a cult following.  Or not.  (I heartily recommend The Last of Sheila.)

I have heard that a novelist's first novel is often very dark and packed full of everything they love.  It can be a story that is too much and not enough.  This is not a novel, nor writer/ director Drew Goddard's first work - he did Cabin in the Woods, which I think is a real kick.  But I suspect this is the first movie where someone cut him a check and gave him final cut.  

After all, you spend $32 million - you throw a bunch of famous stars into something and make it seem sexy in the trailers, and the money should print itself.

SPOILERS

Look, this movie has a lot of style, it's beautifully shot, and features parts of many things I find interesting.  I also like girl-group singers (I've paid to see Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love) and what came out of the Phil Spector studios.  I like heist novels and movies.  I listened to Katrina Longworth's podcast on the Manson Family.  I dig Rat Pack-era entertainment and shenanigans.  But in the end, there's so much going on, there's not enough of anything to make me care much about what's happening.  

It's a film with the aesthetic of a period-piece noir film - more than having the aesthetic of actual noir or the films from the period in which it occurs. But it's really running on a horror movie engine, complete with a final girl you can spot with no problem the minute you clock where things are headed. And that's fine.  But meanwhile, we're cross-cutting and visually borrowing from Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery, and that's...  a choice that really draws comparisons in a way I would think it best to avoid.  

The *problem* though, is that the movie should have been a full forty minutes shorter.  Cut cut cut.  Trim trim trim.  For a movie that really feels like it wants to make out with The Hateful 8, it learned none of the lessons about editing that movie's bloated runtime could have taught us.  I do not need to see John Hamm find all of those devices individually.  That's a 10 second montage.  In part because it doesn't really go anywhere.  I didn't need the Manson Family stuff in flashback.  We know everything the second we see Rose make her phone call.  There's other examples, but that's my general feeling.

It's also a movie that thinks in a small motel, no one is going to hear a shotgun blast, handguns going off, etc...   I've stayed in a hotel where I was the only guest (yes, it was weird).  When you expect you shouldn't be hearing anything, you hear *everything*.  But I'll let that slide on cinematic license.

There are some genuinely great things in the movie.  The problem is that when you kill off John Hamm as your turn to the second act, now we *know* everyone is fair game and we're in the mechanics of a horror movie - and that's when I started doing the calculus for who would make it.  As a viewer I could almost see the movie deciding "people expect X, so we'll do Y, but expect Z to be fine".  And, certainly, the last third of the movie shoves together a mish-mash of our conflicting genres, while also feeling kind of perfunctory.

But... I also didn't really care about who was going to make it.  In this case, it was because the movie is so focused on playing with mechanics - and it really wants to have an emotional core - it kind of doesn't.  I didn't care if the cult sister was saved - and flat out knew she was going to knife someone from the second time we saw her (the real twist here, by the way, would have been her knifing her own sister).  I didn't really feel invested in Lewis Pullman getting absolution even if I knew why the movie was pointing with neon signs about why I should care. 

Frankly, his background came too late, and was so ridiculously over the top, I was distracted with what I was supposed to be looking at.  Tet Offensive (timing seemed off for that)?  Metaphor?  Someone help a man out. 

Frankly - I think it was a mistake to bring in the whole Billie Lee stuff at the end.  Suddenly becoming a Manson Family pastiche at the last second, and telling us too much in advance...  it almost felt like you wanted to say "get on with it".  And I am sure the 2019 release of the well-received, audience favorite Once Upon a Time in Hollywood probably was just an extra kick in the nuts for the producers and Goddard.

And that's the thing.  Everyone is influenced by someone or something, and where Cabin in the Woods played off the fact we know all the horror flick scenarios and tropes.  Doing the same here and playing with various crime film tropes, not subverting them but manipulating the audience for how we know them to work - but without delivering anything much more than surprise value, the move became an exercise in subverting audience expectations rather than subverting the genre or narrative. It doesn't help us dig into the story because there's not really a compelling single narrative thread here. 

Anyway, I wanted to like this, and did, in part.  The actors are all acting their butts off.  I liked the aesthetic and general idea.  But I was also checking my watch *a lot* in the last hour of the movie, and I rarely do that.

Late edit:  Someone mentioned the marketing in the comments.  If you think this is a slick, poppy, fun time where violence is treated like candy... it's not.  The movie is deadly serious about itself.  It was very mis-marketed, or... it was trying to sell a movie that people would be excited for as a fun Friday night at the theater with Rated-R shenanigans, and that more or less disappears in the first twenty minutes.  I do wonder if the demographic for this movie got burned out on post Pulp Fiction crime stories back in the 90's and 00's.