Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6628394/





The El Royale hotel, located off the beaten path, built right on the California/Nevada border with its main lobby, lounge and restaurant spanning each side of both States and with rooms located in both Nevada and California, was during its heyday in the 1950's the go to place for the wealthy and powerful and famous.

The movie opens in 1959 with one solitary man checking into one of El Royale's rooms.

Most folks when they first walk into a hotel room, they make sure that there are plenty of towels, that the TV works, that the bed is not too hard and there are plenty of pillows on it:

this unidentified person does something completely different, opposite, very strange and unconventional which I will not give away.

Fast forward 10 years to 1969, the El Royale has lost its luster and most of its rooms have fallen into disarray. Very few people even know it exists and its rooms have not seen any guests in a long time.

4 strangers arrives at the hotel at almost the same time: a priest, a down and out back up singer dreaming of becoming the next big act in Reno's finest casinos, a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman, and a foul mouthed young woman.

4 strangers who do not know each other with nothing in common and who will give new meaning to two of the many social etiquettes our parents taught us as soon as we were old enough to understand them:

1. don't talk to strangers

and

2. don't stick your nose in business that doesn't concern you.

To say any more is to spoil the movie.

I can say that the first act of the movie where each one of the 4 strangers are introduced with a backstory and a flashback scene is the best part.

But the 2nd act where the story tries to cohesively bring them together by finding some type of common ground among them is when the story begans to unravel and fall apart.

Then by the time the 3rd and final act is shown, everything just felt forced, formulaic, convenient and way too clean and tidy.

We have seen this movie many times before, there is even a genre name for it on IMDB:

"Group of Strangers meet in a one room setting movies"

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls066670465/

Director Drew Goddard, famous for his directorial debut of the very successful anti-horror comedy Cabin In The Woods and for writing critical hits such as The Martian and Cloverfield, tries to take something that's been done before and elevate it to a different and better level:

he attempts to do so by evoking narrative and exposition styles borrowed from many similar movies before it but he just can't completely pull it off.

On IMDB, this movie has received a rating of 7.3 out of 10.0 using the mean average from a total of 381 reviews:

65 of them gave it a 10 out of 10, calling it: A Must See, Brilliant, Great Movie!, Outstanding, Best I've seen in a long time, Awesome, Wow, They don't make it like this anymore, Best Tarantinosque movie ever, Best Movie of 2018, Favorite film of 2018, etc., etc.

180 of them gave it an 7 to 9 out of 10 rating with equal praises to boot.

On Rotten Tomatoes, out of 218 critics who reviewed it, 191 of them gave it a Fresh tomato rating and called it exquisite, audacious, top notch, intriguing, mesmerizing, magnificent, etc., etc.

This must be the most critically over-hyped movie by both audience and critics I've seen this year and in the past couple of years.

It's worth a look if you have almost 2 hours and 21 minutes to spare but by the time the ending credits start to roll, you won't even have one memorable scene from it to remember it by.

1/5