Bad Times at the El Royale

01 Jan 0000

Score

Bad Times at the El Royale is a slow-paced movie with no twists and some boring turns. Masquerades as a character-driven mystery-drama when it’s entirely plot-driven and suffers from no mystery whatsoever. Somehow saved by respectable cinematography, aesthetics, and acting so if you have the time to kill and don’t mind a boring story Bad Times at the El Royale is worth a watch.

Review

Bad Times at the El Royale is trying to be more than just another film. It wants to be artsy and well-reviewed by film buffs. I have heard others describe it as an attempt at a Tarantino-esque thriller, which is an apt description. An attempt sure, but certainly not a success. The problem is that the director obviously doesn’t understand the key elements of Tarantino films.

Let’s see, what makes up a Tarantino film? It’s a series of scenes set in one location with heavy dialogue interspersed with quick high-octane action that drives the plot forward. There are a lot of long single-shot scenes and the camera almost never cuts during the transition from dialogue to action. And of course a Tarantino film needs to be supported by fantastic acting. The El Royale has all of this in spades. I would go as far as to say that the film technique and acting are just one small hair shy of Tarantino at his peak. The problem is that the movie has nothing else. And when I say “nothing else” I mean just that, fantastic film technique and quality acting is all The El Royale has going for it. Everything else is objectively terrible.

What’s terrible? Nothing more than the writing, the plot, the characters, the pacing, the scenery, and the film just isn’t grounded at all. I’ll go through them one by one.

The Plot

There is no plot. That’s not to say that the plot doesn’t make sense. The plot makes total sense, but there just isn’t anything to it. Sure the characters talk a lot and most of them have some sensible motivations but those motivations aren’t what drive the plot forward. The plot drivers are all boring McGuffins and this is what really turned me off of the film. Take for instance the first thing of note that happens in the main story.

Highly-skilled Secret Agent Dies to a Blundering Kidnapper

The secret agent incapacitates the kidnapper and tries to save the victim, but the kidnapper just gets back up and shoots him. Is there anybody out there who thinks this is good writing? Hero ignores the victim after hitting them once and gets punished for it? That’s trope’s so overused its beyond laughable to seriously put that in your story. For it to be the plot point that sets up everything to follow it? This one mistake alone is enough to ruin the whole movie. And I haven’t even given you the full of it.

This whole scenario plays out after we are explicitly shown that this secret agent is plodding and meticulous and another couple scenes showing the kidnapper being unprepared and a little insane. Our secret agent deftly navigates the El Royale and discovers all of it’s secrets in his first 10 minutes of solo screen time. Our kidnapper writes “Fuck You” in a hotel ledger and leaves her hotel door open in plain view of anybody watching outside. Who would you expect to win if the secret agent has the element of surprise and knows the situation perfectly? This isn’t even up for debate, the only way the secret agent would make the mistakes he does is if his character was entirely different. Why show us that he’s competent if he is going to die due to his own incompetence?

The worst part is that this could easily be remedied if they just gave the kidnapper some hidden advantage. Oh wait, she already has a hidden advantage: her victim is on her side! All the director had to do-and he had it right there he set it up himself-is have the victim shoot the secret agent after he turns his back on her. Honestly, if they made just this one improvement to the film I would bump its score up at least 2 points maybe even 3. It would show that at least they tried, at least they tried to make the actions believably driven by characters rather than coincidences, dumb mistakes, and other McGuffins.

Slightly related question: is there anything at all to Seymour’s mission at the El Royale?

Miscellaneous problems

• How does Father Flynn know that the tape is important and why does he seek it out so earnestly?
• What do the title cards even represent? Where the scene is going to be? No, half of the title cards are off by hundreds of miles. Where the focal character considers “home”? This could work but for Seymour and his conflicting “Room One” and “Washington D.C.” scenes. Are they just random slightly related titles to imitate Tarantino? This is the only option that fits.

The Writing

It’s nothing to write home about one way or the other.

The Pacing

El Royale is littered with slow panning shots of Sweet singing. I’ve half a mind that most of the plot’s problems come from the constant necessity to create excuses to include these scenes0. These scenes will, each and every one of them, last for minutes on end without interesting scenery or any real plot development. The most notable offense is a scene after the halfway point of the movie where the Father and Sweet are trying to unearth some money hidden under the floorboards of the El Royale. They have to go through a convoluted ritual wherein the Father hammers the boards to the beat of the song Sweet is singing to mask the noise he’s making. The whole thing is pointless because as soon as they are done the pair are apprehended by the newly arrived Billy Lee and his cultist goons.

Characters

El Royale has unique and wildly intriguing characters. None more so than Miles Miller. He creates the best scene since Seymour’s death with an excellent display of power. It is a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

Conclusion

It’s hard to reconcile this boring, overlong film with Goddard’s wonderful earlier work on The Martian and Cloverfield. The Martian is a whole 3 minutes longer than El Royale; both screenplays are written by the same guy, so why does the first seem to pass by in an instant and the second drag on until you’re so bored you miss the ending? The simple answer is that Goddard is great at writing scenes and connecting them to one another but terrible at crafting a story. Goddard’s early films are all grounded in a driving plot point that lasts until the very end of the movie. The Martian ends if and only if Matt Damon dies or gets home. El Royale has no such driving force. The opening scene sets up the buried money, but that fades into obscurity quite quickly. Seymour revealing his rack of knives and his true nature as a secret agent to the audience sets up a great start to a mysterious spy drama. The Summersprings set up an interesting side story with a moral dilemma. There’s also a single short unexplained scene with Rose and some creepy guy on a beach. Sadly, half of these threads are forgotten about halfway through and the others are pushed to the side by the main plot point which stems from the stupid scene of Rose on the beach!

The whole movie is sidelined by a cult leader who is introduced no more than 30 minutes before the ending of the movie. Billy Lee is of course only related to a third of the cast and has absolutely no history with the El Royale. Its unclear why he even antagonizes most of the cast. I cannot fathom why he doesn’t just pop in, grab Rose and Emily, and get out. You know who Billy Lee reminds me of? the sexual deviant from Pulp Fiction.