Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

“Bad Times at the El Royale” (2018) was an fascinating drama that bit off more than it could chew.
It had a lot of excellent twists but never quite knew what to do with itself every time it turned a corner.

Per the movie, the El Royale Hotel existed around the middle of the century, built exactly on the border of California and Nevada, with the east wing of rooms on the Nevada side and the west wing of rooms on the California side, for $1 more a night.

The story started when singer Darlene (Cynthia Erivo) pulled up to the hotel and met Father Daniel (Jeff Bridges) staring off into the distance from the middle of the parking lot. Inside the hotel, they met vacuum salesman Laramie (Jon Hamm), drifter Emily (Dakota Johnson), and adorably lost bellboy Miles (Lewis Pullman). 
When Miles met the guests in the lobby, he immediately launched into a practiced monologue about the magnificence of the hotel and it’s geographically intriguing location in a way that would fit perfectly into any 1950s Americana propaganda piece.
As they were the only four guests, and Miles the only employee, they got their pick of whichever rooms they wanted (though a map of the hotel only showed nine rooms total, so it wasn’t exactly a smorgasbord), with Laramie making a particular stink about getting the honeymoon sweet, as he was traveling on company dime and none of the others were married either.

From there, each character went to their rooms and the backstory vignettes stared; everything up to this point felt reasonably wholesome, though Father Daniel was too nice, in such a way that it made it clear something was wrong.

It turned out that Laramie wasn’t a vacuum salesman, he was actually an FBI agent who was at the hotel looking for clues to something. He called back to Quantico to make a report, which is how they revealed his real profession, but when another character killed him with a belly full of buckshot, that thread just ended. We never found out what he was looking for or why, or why he’d been sent solo for what was apparently a fairly important operation. And, as the whole of the movie happened over the course of maybe 12 hours, there wasn’t time for backup to arrive to look for him.

Before he died, Laramie discovered that the El Royale was a particularly skeevy place: a hallway ran behind all of the rooms and all of the mirrors were all one-way glass behind which a camera and audio machinery could record the actions of the guests.
Like Laramie, this discovery happened and then just stopped being of any importance. At one point a spool of film was found that apparently showed someone famous doing something infamous in one of the rooms. It had been shot secretly, obviously, but neither the person nor event were ever clarified, and no one did anything with the film after that, despite everyone acting like it contained earth-shattering revelations. I think that the hidden camera thing was supposed to be far more important in the original draft of the script, but then got left in as a sub-plot that never got properly concluded because it lost the pole position.

One by one, each of the other characters’ backstories came to light too. Darlene was fired from the R&B group she was in so she had decided to strike out on her own for freelance work, Father Daniel was tying up loose ends from his brother’s death, and  Emily was trying to put her family back together. Even Miles got a backstory, which was heartbreaking; it showed him to be a Vietnam War vet with a tortured soul who just wanted to find peace.
Unfortunately, from a storytelling perspective, it was never quite clear who we were supposed to be rooting for. The only “good” people in this seemed to be Laramie and Darlene, but Laramie died fairly early on and Darlene mostly just existed. Emily was a good person too, but what was shown for why her family fell apart only explained about half as much as it needed to.

Billy Lee’s (Chris Hemsworth) dramatic introduction signified the start of the third act, which gave the plot the impetus it needed to get the climax going. While the building blocks for his reveal had been placed throughout, the actual event felt rushed and only marginally more solid than a straight-up Deus Ex Machina.
Maybe it didn’t feel properly laid out because I watched this movie over three days, but that generally doesn’t stop me from grasping progression points; Billy Lee felt a lot more two-dimensional than the other characters, which might be why I didn’t like him as much.

Many main characters died, and that’s okay; not every story can have everyone survive till happily-ever-after. “3:10 to Yuma” (1957/2007) didn’t end on a positive note either, but had a good ending, because a telling a good story and having a good ending are not mutually exclusive.
However, the characters that did make it to the end credits didn’t feel like they earned it; I don’t think director Drew Goddard gave them enough development and arc to justify their victory and survival. That said, I also can’t nail down any two, or more, other characters that I would have wanted to survive instead; no one else would have been able to end on a satisfactory note without a lot more movie to get them there.

The the issue I had with this was just that there were so many things that just didn’t feel answered, or things that got answers that weren’t satisfactory.
I wish I could give it a higher rating, because it was a fun movie to watch with a lot of really intriguing ideas that just went nowhere.
The setting - almost exclusively internal to the El Royale - was beautifully mocked up and decorated, and the soundtrack was by Michael Giacchino, so it fit flawlessly, so those two factors definitely buoyed my rating, but the script just wasn’t as strong as its potential.

Definitely take some time to rent/stream this, but I don’t think I would have been happy to see this in theaters.