Directed by:
Drew GoddardScreenplay:
Drew GoddardCinematography:
Seamus McGarveyComposer:
Michael GiacchinoCast:
Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman, Nick Offerman, Xavier Dolan, Shea Whigham, Mark O'Brien (more)VOD (5)
Plots(1)
Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe's El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption... before everything goes to hell. (San Sebastian International Film Festival)
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Reviews (13)
Several people arrive at a small hotel in the middle of nowhere. They have nothing in common at first glance, but in a few hours most of them will be dead, and the rest will be really upset. Drew Goddard directs a smart film in the style of Tarantino with interesting characters, good actors and fun direction. It does run out of breath a bit towards the end, but overall it manages to entertain quite nicely thanks to the ideas, the characters and a few rough twists. It probably won't be a genre classic like The Cabin in the Woods, though.
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A Tarantino flick without Tarantino. Whereas in his previous film, The Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard uniquely juggled the clichés of the horror genre, in Bad Times at the El Royale he only clumsily tries to cook something up from the ingredients of gangster movies and the diversity of characters placed in a precarious situation. But the problem lies in those characters. The definition of the two antagonistic characters (the girls) is weak and their random inclusion in the main storyline (Jeff Bridges looking for something) comes across as superficial. And the film’s least effective and worst-cast character is the one played by Chris Hemsworth, who should have instead kicked the film’s climax up a notch. The film also fails to properly exploit the potential of the “in the wrong place at the wrong time” motif. The intermingling of timeframes is not cleverly developed and the pace is needlessly slow in places, relying on dialogue that lacks refinement. However, Jeff Bridges gets the job done, Dakota is better suited to the role of a bitch than that of the dainty lady in Fifty Shades of Grey, and the young supporting actor Lewis Pullman ends up making the most sense of all.
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A strange mosaic of human destinies that meet in a hotel on the border between California and Nevada. It’s a bit like Goddard wanted to make a Tarantino movie, but he lacks the light hand and sense of humor. But still this is a decent and mainly clever, original watch; you don’t often see this sort of thing these days.
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Drew Goddard, the director of the great The Cabin in the Woods, did not please me at all with this one and after a long time I left the cinema completely bored. (I guess the other four people in the cinema fell asleep and my friends said after an hour that if someone doesn't die and soon, we leave). I had high hopes for this film, the trailers were promising, there decent actors, an attractive premise, and there was also the similarity to both Identity and The Hateful Eight, which I liked, but this one unfortunately failed with me. The film is 142 minutes long and doesn't offer enough enticing material to fully entertain and satisfy the viewer. The hotel with a hidden secret was fine, the sets are nice, the music is great music, and at first I was even entertained by the unknown mystery, but it didn't really go anywhere. Most of the time is given to Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo, who are probably the least interesting characters in the film, with only Dakota Johnson surprisingly pulling it off as an actor, and then Chris Hemsworth, but he shows up half an hour before the end, and that felt like a letdown. The twists and turns are unexpected but not shocking (Lewis Pullman slightly surprised in the ending), the dialogue is futile and the lack of blood and action scenes is a minus for me. There is only one shootout at the end and it's over before I could say shoemaker. Too bad the director didn't pull something in the style of The Cabin in the Woods, it would have fit nicely here. A tedious and not very entertaining film, but it has its own vibe. 60%.
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Perhaps a little too long, but otherwise very, very, very good. The cast is dominated by the fantastic Jeff Bridges and the super-appealing Cynthia Erivo, the script is full of surprises and, thanks to its unpredictability, is decently suspenseful as well (as the finale approached, I was thinking that now truly anything could happen, except perhaps an alien invasion), the colorful cinematography and various directorial ideas match the song soundtrack, and Giacchino's instrumentals manage to impress appropriately. I literally fell in love with the scene with the singing and the dismantling of the floor, but it's far from the only great scene. I'll spare you the unfair comparisons to Tarantino.
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