Review: BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

A single shot prologue shows a man coming into a motel room moving the furniture, the carpet and the floorboards and then hiding a bag under them. The 50s classic 26 Miles plays on the track. This ends badly.

Ten years later, as a title card tells us, the motel is visited by four people who are strangers to each other and we learn that the area of the motel is divided between the states of Nevada and California. There's a thick red line on the ground and the motel floor with each state written on its side of the line. When the guests rouse the clerk he tells them that rooms in California cost a dollar more but gambling is allowed on the Nevada side (and drinking only on the California side). After some picketty persnickety choosing of rooms they retire to them.

Here we learn who each one really is, every one has a story that doesn't show up at first look. This leads to a discovery which I'll leave to the viewer. A series of snap-to causes and effects transform this into a kind of Petrified Forest deal with a charismatic bad guy holding the characters and grinding them through sadistic games to get information of the strange scene he has burst into. Sorry, no spoilers.

This outing from Drew Godard piles on the visual style with a trowel and it is never less than stunning to watch. As a kind of '90s meta-nostalgia we also get a series of hi-cal pop songs from the days of yore (there's even a juke box on set to facililtate this) to juice up proceedings. And after a chunky showdown that will also remind you of a lot of movies you saw in the '90s we're done. Coda, credits, end.

The cast carry themselves well through this. Veteran Jeff Bridges dominates as the priest with a past sliding into dementia. John Hamm works as a kind of amped up Don Draper. Dakota Johnson does what she can with the slighter role she gets and relative newcomers Cynthia Erivo and Cailee Spaeny are standouts. It's Chris Hemsworth who gets the most fun out of his Charles Manson type character (perhaps a little more David Koresh but both are in there) and in the moment when Darlene lets him know why she's not afraid of him with a perfectly sculpted line shows both vulnerability and self awareness which soon will turn to violence. It's a standout performance.

But the problem is that it's well over two hours long and feels like it should have been about ninety minutes. While it is never slow it is repetitious and we get a strong sense of revisited information as the third act tightens up. A sudden revelation that answers an only mildly interesting character thread lets us in on a game changing development towards the end and by that time you might be thinking didn't Tarantino wear this one bare two decades ago? Well, no, as formulaic and self-parodic as he got Tarantino could still deliver a lean loaded gun in both senses. This will pass the time but I bet you won't remember much about it a week after you see it.