Bad Times at the El Royale
Director: Drew Goddard
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 1.5
Various individuals from different backgrounds - an undercover FBI agent (Jon Hamm), a "priest" (Jeff Bridges), a singer (Cynthia Erivo) and a pissy young woman (Dakota Johnson) - arrive at the El Royale hotel, which sits precariously on the border of Nevada and California, and things go haywire when their personal problems become (inexplicably) intertwined. Slickly done, but also tiringly derivative: it's as if Goddard dove into the Tarantino filmography (including Four Rooms) and picked and choose what he wanted ... and then threw in some questionable touches of his own, like making the taciturn bell boy a sharpshootin' war vet and bringing in Chris Hemsworth as a cult leader doing an impersonation of Brad Pitt in Fight Club. While I like that characters get dispatched when one least expects it, it might have helped if any of them were worth giving a rat's tuches about.
