Bad Times at the El Royale is a neo-noir thriller directed by Drew Goddard and starring Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Bridges, Chris Hemsworth, Lewis Pullman, John Hamm, Dakota Johnson, and Cailee Spaney.
The El Royale is a gimmicky hotel that sits half in Nevada and half in California. It had a heyday in the 60s, but now it's empty except for the desk clerk/housekeeper/bartender/heroin addict Miles (Pullman). On this particular day, however, it gets four customers: an affable, confused priest named Flynn (Bridges); Darlene, a singer on her way to Reno (Erivo); a traveling vacuum salesman (Hamm); and a standoffish hippie named Emily (Johnson).
This being neo-noir, however, no one is really who they appear to be (except for Darlene). "Flynn" is actually Doc O'Kelly, a bank robber whose partner buried money in a room in the hotel years ago. Emily just rescued her sister, Rose (Spaney) from a cult in California and has her tied up in her trunk. And Laramie, the salesman, is an FBI agent here to obtain listening devices that the Bureau planted.
And poor little Miles, in addition to being an addict, occasionally gets told to film certain people through the two-way mirrors in every room and then send the film to "management." As the various people follow their agendas, everything goes gloriously off the rails: Emily shoots Laramie dead and wounds Miles, Rose calls her cult leader, Billy Lee (Hemsworth), who shows up with several armed flunkies and takes everyone hostage, and all of the truths come out before the place burns down.
I really like this movie, and not just because I love neo-noir. The pacing is snappy and the scenes typically change just when something interesting happens or we've learned some new fact about a character. The story is pretty much non-linear, and we see the same events from different characters' perspectives, but it's not quite a Rashomon so much as just presenting a rounded out view of the night.
The movie draws heavily on the Manson killings (Rose just slaughtered a couple of people before Emily got her out, and it's all over the news), and Hemsworth plays Billy Lee with sadism and pouty self-importance. Erivo is definitely a standout, not just for her singing, but for the weariness she brings to a black woman being tossed around trying to make a living. Bridges is lots of fun to watch as always, wavering between being the capable criminal he's been all his life and slowly succumbing to dementia.
Pullman is kind of the heart of the movie, though. All through the film all he wants is absolution, but it's not until the end that we find out why - he's a former Army sharpshooter, with over a hundred kills on his soul, which means that when everything goes sideways, he kills the cultists with surgical precision, though in so doing, he's putting more sins on his soul. He finally dies after "Flynn" resumes his priest persona and grants Miles absolution.
The movie is violent and has its share of sympathetic character death, but it's not bleak - it gives us people to root for and like even if they're flawed. The production design is really impressive and the El Royale has a great sense of place when all is said and done (which is also true of Goddard's other movie, The Cabin in the Woods).
My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Crawl
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