Bad Times At The El Royale

Royale, No Cheese

Bad Times At The El Royale
2018 USA Directed by Drew Goddard
UK cinema release print.

So this one surprised me a little.

I took a punt on Bad Times At El Royale and kept my fingers crossed that Drew Goddard, who directed The Cabin In The Woods (reviewed here) would deliver something greater than the dreadful, slickly edited gangster film that the trailer kinda half made it out to be. I’d recently said to somebody that, more often than not these days, trailers really put one off going to see the movie and reflect the tone of said movie in a completely inaccurate manner and... I’m happy to say that this is the case with Bad Times At The El Royale.

Now, the film is about criminally inspired shenanigans at a famous hotel (once owned by Frank Sinatra) which is split in half by the state line which separates Nevada from California (the rooms on the California side are a buck more expensive). It’s also got a rollicking good ensemble cast including Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, John Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman and Chris Hemsworth... who are all truly excellent and it’s nice to see this cast interacting in ways you wouldn’t expect them to here.

I say ways you wouldn’t expect because, although I quite liked The Cabin In The Woods, I did find it incredibly predictable. However, this new film surprised me a number of times when I was sure I knew what was coming next. For example the film has a pre-credits sequence which consists of a static camera watching a room in the El Royale. After a while the action within the shot keeps cutting to different parts of the day in the same shot placement, rapidly, in a montage which shows us the set up one of the film’s main plot points. I don’t want to ruin this sequence for anyone but this set up includes buried treasure (of a sort) and a man with a shotgun. Now, after the sequence ends and the title goes up, the rest of the film takes place ten years later, in 1969 and tells the story of what happens when seven characters converge on the place over the course of the fairly long running time. My point is, though, that I was pretty sure I could figure out the identity of the man with the shotgun within the opening minute of the post opening credits shot but, as it happens, I’m glad to say I was wrong. On the other hand, certain things about this opening set up do go unanswered still by the time the end credits start to roll but, you can take an educated guess at certain things and it’s nice to at least leave a movie with something to think about.

Now, the film has an excellent script, good acting, a nice fluid camera style which alternates between static shots and slow pans when required and it gets you interested in the various characters in a number of chapters which give you a little of the back story of each person and how they came to be here as the movie progresses. It’s an old cliché of a way of giving you the information in the most suspenseful way, to be sure and certain things are deliberately left unsaid (as in that pre-title sequence) so you can draw your own conclusions about them but, for the most part, it’s a very smart movie and it keeps you interested in the way things are going to turn out all the way through. It also feels dangerous a lot of the time, so you fear for the way things are going to go down when you see someone who’s got a gun, for example. Especially when not all the characters are as stable or predictable as you might think... Dakota Johnson’s character, for example, or Chris Hemsworth, who seems to be playing some kind of evil cult leader in the same vein as Charlie Manson.

I guess if I was going to compare it to something else, I might say it’s put together in the same way and with the same intensity as a Quentin Tarantino movie... just with less flowery dialogue (not knocking Tarantino’s dialogue, it’s usually very good, just saying that the speech here doesn’t match expectations of his particular work). Less sonorous dialogue is no bad thing though and I have to say I found the, relatively, smaller amount of ironic, post modernistic references in the movie to be a refreshing change in a film set in this kind of era, to be honest. That being said, Jeff Bridges does sign his name in the hotel register as Father Daniel Flynn, Flynn being the name of his character in the two Tron movies (reviewed here and here)... but I can forgive them that one, I think.

My main criticism of the movie is actually found within that dialogue, however. That being the use of very similar phrases coming out of different character’s mouths, rather then getting them all to speak about things in different ways. For instance, at least two different characters from different backgrounds use the phrase “all the bad” when such a distinctive phrase is not probably something two different protagonists are going to share. So the voice of the writer/director is very much present in the dialogue and... like a lot of writers tend to do and should really think about not doing... all the characters are thus easily perceived to be a version of how he speaks/writes. Which is a shame if you ask me.

The only other thing I didn't like so much was the constant use of songs in the film. They play an important role in terms of both atmosphere and, in at least one scene, commentary on the action but the rest of the music in the film is handled by Michael Giacchino and is less prominent. Maybe if I’d known more than a couple of the songs I would have had a better response to the musical side of the film but, as it stands, I’m not sure it’s quite my cup o’ tea.

All that being said, though, these are really minor criticisms and I have to say I enjoyed Bad Times at The El Royale from end to end. Which is especially impressive because the film has a running time of 2 hours and 22 minutes but it really doesn’t feel that long and the pacing is such, with a cliff hanger seemingly at the end of every chapter stop, that you certainly won’t realise where the time has gone. At least I didn’t so, yeah... pretty impressed with this one. It’s not something I think I could watch again but it certainly holds the attention and I’d definitely recommend you catch this one while it’s at cinemas. There’s a lot of rubbish out there at the moment in movieland but this film certainly doesn’t add to that pile and is worth your time, I’d say. You’ll find yourself caring for characters who probably make a bad first impression on you when you first meet them, which is no mean feat in itself... so give this one a go.

The Cabin In The Woods

Cabin Fever

The Cabin In The Woods

USA 2009 (released 2012)

Directed by Drew Goddard

Playing at UK cinemas now

Joss Whedon wrote this movie.

Now I don’t know much about this guy, but I’ve seen the first few episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and thought the dialogue writing was pretty good. Similarly, I have seen the feature film Serenity and all the episodes of the TV show it comes from, Firefly, and loved them both. Whedon is a pretty good writer in my book... although his writing style is very specific to him which, while it’s to be applauded as the sign of a true artist, also leaves him open to being a little predictable in the way things are expressed.

It’s a common ailment of many writers, no matter what medium they are writing for (it’s especially common in novels), for all the characters to be “speaking from the same place” so to speak, rather than having their own, very different ways of expressing themselves. Usually, when the writing is filtered through a set of different actors, this helps lose that kind of familiarity with the patterns within the words... but when you have someone as genuinely outstanding as Joss Whedon... the writing tends to come through more and take you back to the fact that all the characters are written by the same person.

It’s not particularly a big problem... it doesn’t ruin the experience for me and just reminds me of the basic artifice of the events I am reading/watching. Woody Allen’s writing does exactly the same thing and, frankly, Jean-Luc Godard would approve of all this kind of “showing of the wires” which good writers sometimes inadvertently let happen... so it’s not really a big deal.

I say all this because The Cabin In The Woods is actually, despite all the hype and good word of mouth it’s been getting, quite a predictable film. I don’t think its particularly a fault of the dialogue or even the story itself... I think it’s more to do with the main premise (which is a fairly common one to horror films but dressed up in the trappings of modern technology) being quite good but fairly unwieldy. You can’t really fail to tip your hat as soon as you start drip feeding the little clues as to what’s really going on in the movie... and they do that right from the opening, pre-credits sequence. So I just want to say that if you’re going to see this movie because you want to be surprised to an extent, there’s a good chance you probably won’t be if science fiction, horror or fantasy fiction is your kind of thing.

Similarly, the trailer works against the likelihood of having a “twist ending denouement” because you know certain things about the movie from that too, but let me tell you that you won’t get the whole picture just by watching the trailer. The trailer will, however, spoil the movie to an extent for you because you’ll know from the footage included in it that one of the characters who you thought was dead isn’t. I won’t reveal that one here but if you’ve seen the trailer... you’ll know it when it happens.

And don’t worry about the poster with the three floor, Rubric’s cube style twisting layers... it’s a pretty misrepresentative advertisement for the film. Nothing like this in any way happens in the movie and the cabin, although perhaps a bit of an iceberg from a certain point of view, is a single floor cabin... so pay absolutely no attention to the poster.

The film starts unconventionally and starts giving its secrets away right from the start and, after the opening (and bizarrely “jump scare” title sound and typography), we are introduced to the kids who typically make up these kinds of “red neck slashers in the woods” tales. Although, I have to say, that there’s no really terrible character in this lot, like you would normally get in one of these kinds of movies... yeah, you know, the one you can’t wait to get killed... these five are all pretty likeable people you maybe could stand hanging out with yourself... so you will be rooting for this lot when the killing starts.

I don’t want to say too much about this movie because it’s best to go in fresh (I wish I hadn’t seen the trailer) but I will say that this is certainly a genuine horror movie as opposed to the serial-stalk-and-slash fest that some kids are calling horror movies these days... seriously guys, serial killer movies are thrillers... not horror. There are also quite a few shout outs to the history of horror in film and literature which people familiar with the genre will be happy about. It’s a very diverse and large horror net this film eventually reveals itself to be casting and, though you will figure it all out ahead of time, half the fun is seeing how the idea is executed in this one. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, to name just two, will be happy with some of the homages in this one. There’s also a beautiful little J-Horror tribute in there... and the final shot of the film almost reminded me of something Jack Kirby might have drawn back in the 70s. Postmodernistic eclecticism is definitely the order of the day on this movie.

I think, the thing to remember with this one is that it’s a fun film. It’s really not trying to take itself too seriously, as you will soon learn from Joss Whedon’s typically witty and intelligent writing... coupled with some “more than competent” film-making from the director and his crew. This is horror comedy which a lot of people will really like, I suspect, in terms of the core audience this film is aimed at. What I would say, though, is that I wished that towards the end of the movie it hadn’t suffered from the same problem that plagued the brilliant Monsters VS Aliens animated feature a few years back... in that, I wish that the producers would just have spent some money to secure the rights to some of the “characters” that pop up in this movie... rather than having to parody them and hope the audience “gets it.” Of course, the characters I’m talking about wouldn’t be cheap and the aim of these kinds of movies is to make them relatively inexpensive so the investors can see a big return on them. Horror movies with excessively large budgets are a rare commodity these days, it seems, and who can blame the producers when an 18 rated film means half your intended target audience aren’t even going to be allowed in to see the picture.

At the end of the day.... The Cabin In The Woods is quite a joyous movie but not as remarkable as many might have you believe. It is, however, a fairly fresh look to this particular kind of material (don’t want to spoil it by saying what kind of movie it really is) and horror fans, in particular, will probably have a good time with this one. I’m sure it will pull in the money and I’m sure there will be demand for a sequel... although, I don’t think even the great Joss Whedon could magic up a sequel to this one without quite an elaborate bit of writerly sleight-of-hand... would be interesting to see him write himself out of that corner.