Drew Goddard’s new movie delivers thrills but remains underwhelming.
A jigsaw-puzzle narrative doesn’t make Drew Goddard’s thriller work.
A twisty period thriller set almost entirely in a motel circa 1969, Bad Times at the El Royale is one of those films that have “passion project” stamped all over them. I’m glad such films exist and wish more Hollywood movies would break away from the gravitational pull of endless remakes, sequels, and adaptations of stories from other media. Drew Goddard, on the basis of his scripts for Cloverfield, World War Z, and The Martian, has made enough money for the studios that they owe him a shot at indulging a whim that doesn’t fit into any of the accepted blockbuster categories and doesn’t obviously have any audience whatsoever awaiting it. As producer, writer, and director of El Royale, Goddard evidently poured a lot of himself into the project. Yet despite some appealing qualities, it is in the end a stylish misfire.
The motel of the title is a seedy, eerie establishment that straddles the line between Nevada and California, near Lake Tahoe. The state line runs right through the middle of the lobby; gambling is legal only on the Nevada side, but drinks can be bought only in California. Goddard’s estimate of the value of this idea as a jumping-off point for his movie exceeds my own.
The hotel is empty when a variety of shady characters (inexplicably) arrive at the same time in search of rooms. One is a vacuum-cleaner salesman (Jon Hamm), one a forgetful priest (Jeff Bridges), one a hippie (Dakota Johnson), one an R & B singer (Cynthia Erivo). There’s also a nervous young hotel clerk (Lewis Pullman), and later we’ll meet a cult leader (Chris Hemsworth) and a naïve girl (Cailee Spaeney) who has fallen under his spell. It seems a safe bet that these people are not what they initially seem. (The only uncomplicated character, it turns out, is also the only black one: Screenwriters these days seem to have a hard time depicting black people as fully fleshed-out human beings.)
A prologue has established that ten years ago, a desperado (Nick Offerman) stashed a bag beneath the floorboards of one of the rooms, but Goddard takes his time establishing exactly what that has to do with what’s happening in the present day. Leisurely flashing back in time to uncover everyone’s backstory, and revisiting events from multiple points of view, gives the film the same jigsaw quality as Pulp Fiction, only this time there is little comedy except for the occasional sardonic line of dialogue.
As a drama, however, the film doesn’t have a lot to offer. Once we’ve sorted out who everybody is and what they’re after, there isn’t an overarching structure, a lesson, an insight. The endless chatter in the early going about the dividing line between Nevada and California, for instance, is paralleled with a later scene in which people discover that being placed arbitrarily in a role can become an impetus for savagery, but the dualism theme doesn’t lead anywhere interesting. “Choose a side, let’s have ourselves an allegory!” the cult leader announces during one of many sequences that are thrilling by themselves but never cohere with the rest.
At its best, El Royale is wickedly suspenseful, with its studied horror-film pace occasionally thrown off by lightning shocks and sudden reversals of fortune. A scene in which one character unlocks a door and goes on a tour of the back corridors of the motel, for instance, gradually unveils just how delectably weird the goings-on really are and builds to a series of surprises. A big part of the suspense is contained in the foreboding musical interludes (mostly Motown, along with Deep Purple and flower-power rock) that make for fine set pieces, but though each of them works on its own, there are too many of them (the film runs two hours and 20 minutes). Moreover, the central secret that promises to tie everything together, hinted at for two hours, just goes away without a big revelation.
We are meant to marvel at the intricacy of Goddard’s plotting, as in the meta-horror comedy caper The Cabin in the Woods (2012), the only previous film he directed as well as wrote. The El Royale narrative isn’t actually audacious or brilliantly engineered, though; it turns out to be a pretty familiar chase-a-bag-of-money story. What makes it seem complicated is that it’s chopped up and told out of order. Post-Pulp Fiction, this technique strikes me as a shortcut. Stamping a routine story “labyrinthine” doesn’t make it clever.