Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: Bad Times at the El Royale
January 15, 2019
Bad Times at the El Royale - Buy from Amazon: DVD, Blu-ray Combo Pack, or 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack
Bad Times at the El Royale was a film I was really hoping would do well at the box office. It has a great cast, I’m a fan of the the writer / director, and I love Film Noir. However, it wasn’t to be. It only managed seventh place during its opening weekend and quickly left theaters. Did it deserve better? Or did it fail to live up to its potential in terms of quality as well?
This is going to be a short summary, because while Bad Times at the El Royale is an ensemble movie, we hit unacceptable spoilers long before the last of the ensemble are introduced.
The film starts with a prologue. We see a man enter a room at the El Royale hotel, removes the carpet, prys up the floorboards, and drops a bag in the space below. He then returns the room to the way it was and waits. There’s a knock on his door, but he relaxes when he sees who it is and lets the person in, only to be immediately shot in the back.
We flash forward ten years and watch as Darlene Sweet drives up to the El Royale, unpacks her trunk, and begins to head to the main lobby. Before she gets far, she spots Father Daniel Flynn and the pair have a pleasant conversation, mainly about the El Royale’s gimmick. (It’s built right on the California / Nevada border, so half of the rooms are in either state, while main lobby is split right down the middle.) When they get to the main lobby, there’s another customer, Laramie Seymour Sullivan, a vacuum cleaner salesman, already there. You can tell he’s a salesman, because he’s got a charm he must use on costumers a lot, one that feels very loud, but very fake. He greets them, tells them the reception desk has been empty since he got there, so he’s making some coffee. He doesn’t care if they register ahead of him, but he does lay claim to room one.
The conversation between the three turns awkward for the first, but not last, time. This gets Darlene to bang on the receptionist’s door loud enough to wake him from his “vacation”. The concierge, Miles Miller, finally starts to sign people into the motel. It is as this time that another guest, Emily Summerspring, shows up. At first she asks for room one, but when Laramie says he already called dibs on that room, she asks for room seven, the furthest room from him.
This is when a title card shows up with “Room One” and we switch to Laramie’s point of view. He brings his luggage into his room, unpacks his toiletries, and then unpacks his vacuum only to reveal a false bottom in the case and a set of tools hidden within. He calls home to say a bedtime prayer with his daughter and while he’s doing this, he takes apart the phone and nonchalantly removes a bug. It isn’t until he discovers a second bug that his attitude changes. He then does a very thorough search of his room and discovers bug after bug becoming more concerned with each one. It is after finding over a dozen bugs that he notices something strange with the mirror and realizes the building is much wider than than the room itself. He goes to the main lobby to investigate, but what he finds is way too deep into spoiler territory.
I love Film Noir, while I’ve really liked most of Drew Goddard’s previous films he wrote and / or directed. In fact, Cabin in the Woods is one of my favorite horror movies of all time, while The Martian is one of my favorite Sci-fi movies of all time. So it should come as no surprise that I love this film. It gets the Film Noir style down nearly perfectly and the writing and acting add to the overall style. The flashbacks to each character's backstory helps the film maintain a slow burn in terms of pacing, which I admit might not be a selling point for a lot of people. If you are not almost immediately drawn into this world, then the pacing will be too slow to pull you in once the plot really gets going and I think this is why the film wasn’t able to win over audiences. (It only managed a B minus from CinemaScore.)
There is only one extra, but it is an in-depth 29-minute making of featurette. I would have preferred more, but a lot of films that struggle at the box office get a lot less than this.
If you are a fan of Film Noir and are looking for a slow-burn thriller, then Bad Times at the El Royale is a must have. If you are just a fan of the writer / director and / or the cast, then it is still worth checking out. There are not a ton of extras on the DVD / Blu-ray / 4K release, but it is still worth owning.
Video on Demand
-1-News.jpg)
The Movie
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, Bad Times at the El Royale, Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson, Drew Goddard, Lewis James Pullman, Cynthia Erivo