Bad Times at the El Royale

Bad Times at the El Royale is one of those movies which is fun while it’s happening and then falls apart when you think about it. Which is a bit disappointing. I will watch most things with either Jon Hamm or Jeff Bridges in them, and I’d really liked The Cabin in the Woods which was Drew Goddard’s last outing. Actually, it’s comparison with Cabin which shows what went wrong; Bad Times isn’t crazy enough to get past its contrivances.

The biggest problem after the fact is that there’s way too much going on. Half a dozen people show up at a hotel which straddles the California/Nevada border, and shenanigans ensue. That’s fine. What’s not so fine is that every single one of them has an ulterior motive for being there, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense that they’d all have arrived the same afternoon. No amount of Jon Hamm and Jeff Bridges being charming can make that work. Hell, no amount of Chris Hemsworth being the world’s funniest, creepiest own-brand Charlie Manson can make that work. 

But while it’s underway, you don’t quite notice. These are good performers playing well. Everyone has something to do, and everyone has at least a few moments which really register. Early on the plot whacks an expensive movie star, just so that you get the message that this is serious business and anyone can die at any time. And not many of the rest of the cast get out alive. 

Along the way they all land their characters, and each of them turns out to be hiding some kind of a secret which turns their introduction upside down. Each of these reversals works on its own; indeed the final one is pretty much heartbreaking. It’s just that there are too many of them happening all at once, and in a movie which has been so painstaking in setting everything up so that the pieces spin against each other, it eventually gets baffling that there’s no clever explanation for how so many people with problems all turn up at the same hotel in the same few hours.

Despite all the good work done by Jeff and Jon, the standouts are Cynthia Erivo’s Darlene and Chris Hemsworth’s Billy Lee, playing the best and the absolutely worst people in the whole movie. Hemsworth, in a way, is more surprising. I didn’t realise he had it in him to play a charismatic bastard, but if there’s any justice in the world, he will spend the next five years doing nothing else. Apart from anything else, anything that lets him boogie while threatening to murder everyone in the room probably deserves some kind of UNESCO world heritage status.