directed by Drew Goddard
starring Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson, Cynthia Erivo, Chris Hemsworth
Recommended? Depends on your taste. A showcase for some fine acting.
I was pulled into the theater to see Bad Times at the El Royale after viewing the previews, I was intrigued for a few reasons: Jeff Bridges, who has become one of the most watchable actors around (loved his turn in the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit, among other roles). Cynthia Erivo, who I knew to be an incredible Broadway performer and singer from The Color Purple but whom I had never seen on the big screen. Jon Hamm, who seems to have built on his Mad Men experience by portraying a wide range of challenging characters on screen (the nasty villain of last year's Baby Driver comes most immediately to mind). A shirtless Chris Hemsworth as a villain. A twisty and deviously concocted plot that sparked dim echoes of Pulp Fiction. What appeared to be vividly gorgeous sets depicting a Rat Pack-era motel and crisp cinematography capturing it all.
I definitely got all that and more. Probably more than I anticipated, or wanted, really. But I'll get to that.
Bad Times at the El Royale is a film noir crime drama, set in the 1960s. A rustic themed motel straddling the California/Nevada state line, the El Royale has seen better days, and few travelers stop. Guests can stay on the Nevada or the California side, and the expansive lobby with its timbered walls resembles a ski or hunting lodge. This deceptively hospitable outpost is where several characters check in, almost none of them who or what they appear to be.
Erivo plays Darlene, a fired girl group singer determined to make it own her own, heading to a gig in nearby Reno. Her gorgeous vocalizing in many of the scenes are a bright spot in a mostly dark film. Bridges is Father Flynn, an ex-con bank robber masquerading as a priest to find the loot his murdered partner buried in one of the rooms decades earlier. Hamm, posing as loquacious salesman Laramie Sullivan, is a federal agent trying to clean up evidence of a longtime surveillance operation at the motel. Dakota Johnson, a bitch for no discernible reason, demands a room far from the others; seemingly a ruthless kidnapper who pulls a girl from her trunk and ties her to a chair in the room, Emily is actually trying to save her brainwashed younger sister from a charismatic hippy cult leader, who ultimately turns up at the motel to claim her with unpleasant results. As played by Hemsworth, Billy Lee is a sexy nutcase, spewing new age jargon, sparking mayhem and dancing, in mesmerizing Jim Morrison fashion, between bouts of violence. There's also Miles, the motel's sole employee, played by Lewis Pullman, a seemingly mild mannered young man hiding a number of unpleasant personal and professional secrets.
As each of the characters slowly discovers what Miles has long known, which is that the rooms aren't exactly private, complications ensue. Assuming that he is witnessing a kidnapping, Hamm attempts to enter Johnson's room and she guns him down. Stray buckshot breaks the mirror, revealing the surveillance corridor behind all the rooms and the fact that she's also wounded Miles, perhaps fatally.
Bridges and Erivo, after a bumpy start where he tries to drug her and she knocks him cold, make a pact; she'll help him find the money in exchange for a cut.
And then there is a sort of McGuffin, similar to the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, concerning a reel of film from the hidden surveillance camera in the motel, documenting an unnamed big shot doing God Knows What in one of the rooms, a film that could net big bucks if peddled to the right media or government outlet. Though it wasn't clear, I got the feeling that Erivo's character might also have appeared in that film. The story is lurid, grimey, violent, and a perfect example of the contemporary noir genre in vivid color.
This is the second film I've seen this year, after A Star Is Born, where the pacing seems to follow a more natural rhythm than the whiz-bang editing and rat-a-tat dialog of other films. Which isn't to say that Bad Times doesn't have some great lines. It does. Hamm's opening monologue as he blusters into the motel demanding the best room in the place, is a showpiece of acting as he paints a false picture of himself as a hail-fellow-well-met, twisting his tongue around old-fashioned terms such as "hidey-hole" for the hotel, and "fortnighter" for his impressive piece of luggage. It's this speech, in fact, that lets us know that this film is going to be something of a rollercoaster and that we should buckle up. Bridges is spellbinding as a desperate, aging outlaw with degenerative memory loss. His character's unlikely partnership with Erivo's streetwise singer Darlene is the heart of the film.
As I watched this colorful, suspenseful, unusual tale where no one is who they say they are, I was briefly reminded of the classic Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall flick Key Largo, a 1948 film noir crime drama that also centers on a rundown, out of the way hotel where some desperate characters meet. The Hotel Largo has seen better days when Bogey arrives, looking for the family of an old army buddy. He finds his buddy's widow and father trying to keep the hotel going as they host a disparate group of folks, one of them a homicidal gangster on the run (Edward G. Robinson) who holds the others hostage as a hurricane barrels down on them. But as a product of its times, Key Largo doesn't ever get as down and dirty as what Bad Times director Goddard has in store.
Bad Times has numerous plot twists and turns to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. In the meantime, it's a total delight to the eyes -- and to the ears, as much of its soundtrack comes from a steady infusion of 60s hits and the characters' frequent references to them. The film takes its time in unspooling the characters and their motivations, and then sets them on a collision course that begins to feel tedious and overwrought by the final quarter of the flick, to the point where I started to wonder, "when will this be over?"
The blood-soaked fire-torched finale of the film was a little much for me, but that doesn't erase the fact that overall this a compelling and suspenseful story with the talents of some incredible actors on display.
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