TL;DR. Bad Times at the El Royale could alternatively be titled: Drew Goddard can't write well. This is not a bad movie. A bad movie can be fun. This is not a good movie. A good movie makes you want to see it again. This is lukewarm, a 'C', passing grade, well-executed in ways, with good moments and performances. But it isn't constructed well and won't stand the test of time.
I went into this movie really rooting for it. My final thoughts before the movie started was a prayer or wish: please be good. This was the first movie I'd seen trailers for that made me want to see it. By the way, whoever edited the first trailer for this movie did an awesome job. If only the movie that was teased in that trailer had show up here. There are good things here. I want to specifically call out the work of Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who knocked it out of the park. Jeff Bridges did yeoman work, giving his character more depth than was on the page. Chris Hemsworth has a shot at career outside of Thor and John Hamm is very solid in what he was given to work with.
What they were given to work with...sigh. That's the problem.
First a quick plot summary:
Four strangers meet at a cool 60's throwback hotel...sometime in the early 70's. (problem #1) The hotel is wired for eavesdropping and there are two way mirrors for filming the guests, all set up by the mysterious 'Management' (problem #2). One of the four is a singer, one is a priest, one is a salesman, one is a mouthy hippie chick. Most of them are not what they seem: the priest is actually an ex-con looking for money hidden by his brother here, the salesman is an FBI agent here to retrieve Bureau listening devices, the hippie chick has kidnapped her younger sister and the singer is a holy and blameless paragon of all that is good and righteous (problem #3). Add in a drug-addicted supposed ex-military desk clerk desperate to confess to a priest and then add a cult leader and his followers, come to retrieve the kidnapped girl and shake, but not well.
The specifics of the plot barely matter but here goes: the FBI agent discovers more surveillance stuff in his room than what he was set here to retrieve. This leads him to investigate, and he discovers the secret passages that show the two-way mirrors. It also shows the kidnapped girl tied up. He reports his findings to the FBI who, for plot reasons, tell him to disable all the cars and not to interfere with the kidnapping. He does the former, but doesn't do the latter. Breaking in and trying, incompetently, to rescue the kidnapped girl. The hippie chick kills him with a shotgun and the shot spray wounds the desk clerk who was behind the two way glass. The fake priest and the singer talk some, he has memory problems, and the room he picked did not have the money hidden in it. It is instead in the singer's room. He tries to drug the singer so he can search her room but she hits him in the head with a bottle (problem #4) and tries to run away. But can't, so she and the fake priest agree to split the money. They get the money but before they can get away, the cult leader shows up, ties everybody up, there is speechifying, and death and the movie ends with the priest and the singer getting away to Reno.
The movie jumps around in time and space (problem #5) and the plot is not told in linear fashion. If it had, it might have been a tight 90 minutes and not a bloated 2 hours, 20 minutes (problem #6). There is a lot of potential here, a lot of teasing ideas. But this is Drew Goddard's whole career in a nutshell: good ideas poorly executed. The guy just does not understand setup and payoff. He's half the creative staff of Cabin in the Woods, which has one of the worst endings I've ever seen in a movie. But I think what made Cabin in the Woods work was, and I hate to say this as a Joss Whedon hater, was Joss Whedon. For all my dislike of him as a person, Whedon at least understands character and setup and payoff. Drew Goddard does not.
But let's look at what worked, what didn't and how this movie COULD have been great.
What worked:
1. The support staff. Drew Goddard has writing, directing and a producing credit here. And the production side worked well. Art direction by Michael Diner and Lisa Van Velden is wonderful, sets and costumes are great and professionally done. I want to call out Seamus McGarvey's camera work again because he almost saves this movie. Rob Fournier as the Armorer, along with James Dever and the stunt crew, nailed the little gunplay there at the end. Take a bow, one and all, you were pros.
2. Key performances. Jeff Bridges deserves special praise. The script didn't always support him, particularly at the end, but he gives his character humanity and depth. Jon Hamm was solid, he needs to get more lead work. Chris Hemsworth can act in addition to just being hot, good news for him. Cynthia Erivo did very well for a first movie role. Cailee Spaeny as 'Boots' is believable as a child sexualized way too young and devoted wholeheartedly to Chris Hemsworth's Billy Lee. The rest of the cast are pretty much ok, though they aren't given much to work with, script-wise. Dakota Johnson is...pretty. Maybe she could have been better than that but she just isn't given a chance to be a good actress here. Or maybe she isn't one.
3. The tease. This is what we can give Drew Goddard credit for. Him and whoever cut that first trailer. There are promising ideas here: Who is recording the guests? Why? What does the cult leader want? (problem #7) Who is on the film? Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? Why is the FBI interested in this hotel? You've got the hooks to tell many interesting stories here. Sadly, most of them are unexplored or answered badly. (problem #8)
4. The music. If you like soul music, this is your movie. And if Cynthia Erivo is actually singing in this movie, she's a good singer. (not good enough to be magic, though. Problem #9) I like Deep Purple quite a bit so 'Hush' showing up with it's guitar work was quite a contrast to the harmony and vocals of the rest of the soundtrack. It's all very much like a Quentin Tarantino movie. But here's the problem there: Drew Goddard wants to be Quentin Tarantino in this movie. But he doesn't have the chops and doesn't understand what QT does well: scenes and character and doesn't understand what QT doesn't do well, namely tying scenes together to tell a complete story. So let's talk about what didn't work and we'll start with the problems one by one.
What didn't work:
Problem #1: This isn't grounded in a specific time. This is a problem because the movie jumps around in time a lot and because it's unwilling to put a specific day and year on it, the audience is confused and adrift. The El Royale used to be a big spot back in the 60's. So we apparently AREN'T still in the 60's, but everyone dresses like they are. J.Edgar Hoover is alive, Nixon is President, Vietnam is still going on but Watergate isn't in the news, so it has to be 1969-1972. There's some live TV with Nixon talking about how cease-fires doesn't work vs insurgencies (which is accurate, by the way), so if someone is really up on their game, maybe they can pinpoint the date from there. But the audience shouldn't have to work this hard. And, yes, the date matters. You can't just set stories in 'the past', if you want the audience to buy into it. Without that grounding, you are stacking the deck against yourself.
Problem #2: The Management is handled badly. Here we have a mysterious 'management' that has all the rooms wired for eavesdropping (11 pieces of equipment alone in one visually-memorable early scene), it has two way mirrors, secret passageways. Who are they? What do they want? Why was the hotel set up this way? What are the consequences of discovery of the Management's actions? NONE of this is answered or paid off. What we get is a handwave of 'What is this, a pervert hotel? Yeah, pretty much.' That's it. Nothing deeper. Just some P.O. Box where the desk clerk mails film. How does Management know who to film? No idea. It's a cool idea that Drew Goddard fucked up. (See Lost, which Goddard worked on)
Problem #3: Darlene Sweet has no dark secret and thus doesn't make sense. I'm putting aside the actress and her performance, which was fine, and I just want to talk about the character. Everyone else in here, from the kidnapped girl to the priest to the desk clerk is not what they appear. All except Darlene. She is just what she appears to be: a singer down on her luck. She also clocks the fake priest with a wine bottle, before she could reasonably know or before she's shown to be suspicious of him. She steals the FBI agent's gun. She doesn't try to call the cops from the pay phone. She does demand half the stolen money. She, in short, does not act like a normal woman. It seems like she, too, might have a secret dark side. But no. She is the holy and blameless paragon, bordering on the 'Magical Negro' trope. But that's not all, she's also the mouthpiece for Drew Goddard, who decides to have his #MeToo moment in a speech that brings the movie to a screeching halt. She gets to lecture all the men in the world and then gets to use some weird reverse psychology on the desk clerk to get him to shoot the bad guys. And in the end, she gets her money, gets her job in Reno and everything is happy even though she's not wearing her fake hair anymore. (By the way, she looked better with the wig on and with the long dress.) This is another missed opportunity to either treat her as a true innocent or to give her the same dark motivation everyone else seems to have. This leads into the next problem.
Problem #4: Darlene somehow figures out the priest isn't on the up and up and clocks him with a wine bottle. First and least, having seen people hit with beer bottles, which are smaller, a full bottle of wine doesn't shatter hitting someone in the head. It makes a dent. A big dent. It can cause concussions easily and death. It doesn't make pretty, tiny head scratches. This is just Hollywood bullshit though and can be ignored I suppose. More relevant is there there is no way she would have suspected the priest character. He hasn't given himself away. If anything, he's been kind, generous and open with her...more than anyone else in the movie and maybe her life. There is another handwave line by her that 'you've been used enough, you learn to recognize a user'. But that's just bad writing and directing. If that's true, then you should set that up. Setup and pay off, remember? You need to give her something to make her suspect him. Some slip up. Some reason to suspect that he is not just dishonest, but actually means her harm. Because she doesn't just avoid him, she fucking clocks him with a bottle and goes running out into the rainy night without taking her coat or even her shoes. NOTHING we've seen or she's seen would justify any of that.
Problem #5: The movie jumps around in space and time. One thing that's common for me in first drafts is that I'll write a lot of exposition, a lot of backstory. On second drafts, I'll cut almost all of that out and instead I'll weave that into the plot or reveal it through actions, or as a last resort, character dialog. Drew didn't do that cutting. As you can tell from the 2:20 run time. So we get the 'back story' of each character, jumping back in time for each character, sometimes repeatedly. When are we when we jump? No idea. the Priest's robbery takes place 'ten years ago' but that's the best we get. Each jump causes the audience to 'reset'. Suddenly the audience needs to figure out again, where we are, when we are, who's here, what's happening, etc. Tarantino did this a lot in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But he did it well and it always tied right back into the moment we left the main thread of the story. Drew doesn't do it smoothly and we instead are jarred time and again. And often, we don't need it. We don't need to see Darlene's backstory of being sexually harassed, it's enough for us to know she's a down-on-her-luck singer. We don't need to see the cult leader meeting and seducing the kidnapped 'Boots', we don't need to see half-abuse, half-murder implied scene with the sisters, we don't need to see the priest in jail getting his diagnosis. Pull all of those out and the movie still works. The problem is that the author is too close to his own words and loves them too much. I get it. But Drew clearly needs a collaborator that tells him what to cut and what to keep. He didn't get enough of that here. And that ties into the next problem directly.
Problem #6: The run time of this movie is two hours, twenty minutes. Unnecessarily complex, that's this movie in a nutshell. This could have been a tight, interesting 90 film. You can add a few minutes here or there as needed but there is no reason this movie should be this long. The flashbacks and the need to 'tell' rather than 'reveal' is part of the problem. But the unneeded complexity is the other part. For example, as a metaphor for the movie: the FBI Agent is masquerading as a vacuum salesman. Inside his huge, bloat, oversized sample box is...a fake vacuum. And under the fake vacuum is a secret panel. And in the secret panel is a briefcase. And in the briefcase is...lock picking tools. Just...normal snips and probes and tension bars that fit inside a normal leather pouch. You could just hide these tools in your luggage. Or why bother hiding it? Who's going to search his stuff? He might be undercover but he's not going undercover anywhere that Russian agents are after him. It's needlessly complicated. And the revelation is underwhelming. Much like the revelation of the spying windows, the movie camera, it happens either too early or too late, depending on the kind of story you're trying to tell. Know when to cut. Know when to trust your actors. Know what needs to be in your dialog and stage direction. Less is almost always more. Next time, Drew: start with a 60 minute cut, then see what you absolutely need to get to 90 minutes. This is a suspense movie, keep it tight, keep the audience in suspense. Flashbacks kill suspense, by the way.
Problem #7: The ultimate antagonist is confused in his motivation and his purpose in the plot. This is a problem with almost all the characters: they aren't real people. They don't act like real people, they don't want real people things. They are two dimension cutouts that mouth dialog, that's it. Billy Lee, played as well as could be by Chris Hemsworth, seems to be a cult leader who believes...well we don't know what his cult is based on, except that maybe it's based on the desire of everyone to fuck him. Which it might be. There are weirder cults out there. And his sexuality, not his threat of violence, seems to be what ties people to him. But what does his cult believe and how does it tie into the plot? We don't know. Chris makes a vague statement about how much he hates being forced to choose between two things, like right and wrong. And yet...he makes the tied up guests choose red or black in the end. It doesn't make sense for his theology, for lack of a better term, because his character and his worldview isn't developed. He's given too much screen time or not enough depth in what he is on camera for. Why is he asking for 'the truth' about who everyone is and where the money came from? Why does he care? His theology isn't about truth or hatred of lies or deception, though it easily could have been. He demands answers because the author put those words in his mouth, not because they would come from them naturally.
In contrast, take the Usual Suspects, written by Chris McQuarrie and directed by gay pedophile Bryan Singer. This is my favorite movie of all time, so I'm biased, but everyone in that movie feels real. They way they talk, what they talk about, what they care about or who...it all feels natural. That's good writing. Even the bad guy in the Usual Suspects is clear enough in his motivations to be the antagonist for the main characters.
Your protagonists are only as good as their obstacles. The struggle to get a nickel out of sewer grate so you can buy some candy isn't much of a story. A bad guy who gets defeated by shoving him down, isn't much of an antagonist. A cult leader who gets cut off and verbally shut down by a tied up prisoner...isn't much of a threat. I know it made Drew feel good to broadcast his Virtue Signal but it gutted his already thinly-motivated bad guy, Billy Lee. And a bad guy who is emasculated isn't a threat and your victory over him means little. If Princess Leia had snapped her fingers at Dark Vader or slapped him and survived, then it makes Vader look weak and not terribly interesting as an opponent.
Problem #8: Unanswered story hooks and wasted opportunities. Some of this I'll touch back on in the 'how it could have been great' section below. And I already mentioned how The Management was mis-handled. But there's more than that here that isn't explored or answered satisfactorily. One is the film. A big deal is made over this film of someone having sex, but we're not told who it is. All we're told is that it's a guy and he's now dead in today's time...whenever that is. He's important and famous, easily recognizable. And the line is said by Billy Lee that 'sometimes the legend of the man lives on after he dies' or something like that. Who is it? The movie doesn't say. I suppose it should be left to our imagination but...it's not really an interesting revelation, is it? It could be. What if it's JFK? Well, everyone today knows that JFK would and did fuck everything that moved. So that's not much of a revelation, maybe not even much of one back then. So who is it? Well, it's vague for no good reason and it's a missed opportunity.
Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? This is another handwave. The Priest said 'it doesn't matter, no one's looking for it' and 'everyone else is dead'. Which is such a missed opportunity it's laughable. It's basically removing a plot thread and a possible antagonist right off the table. Now I get that we're already running long (in the movie and in this review :) ) and you need to manage your characters and plot. But the money is the prime motivation for one, maybe two characters. It should be given more respect, be higher stakes, more valuable and more interesting. It should be what people are fighting over. Again, I have a suggestion that would be an easy twist to tie it all together. But we get no one and nothing about who backstabbed the thieves in the first place. And, keep in mind, that is the inciting incident of this whole movie. And it's tossed away and never exploited.
Why is the FBI here? Seriously, this pervy hotel has been around and spying on people for year. Did the FBI know about that? Is the FBI 'The Management'? (What an easy fix that would make.) If the FBI doesn't know about it, does it care? Why or why not? What does the FBI intend to do about any of it? Why is the FBI, which has direct jurisdiction over kidnapping, not interested in a kidnapping? No idea, any of it. Once Jon Hamm is dead, he means nothing to the plot. Stupid and a waste, again.
Problem #9: Characters in this movie are not believable. This mostly isn't a dig on the actors performances, again, with few exceptions, I believe they acted the way the script and plot demanded. This is a failure of writing and directing. For example, despite a very strong performance by Jeff Daniels, I don't believe that his thief character is SO entranced by Darlene's singing that it's some legendary gift, worth surrendering half of 'his' money and worth defying wacko cultists over. I just don't buy it.
The kidnapper, Dakota Johnson's Emily character starts out sassy and defiant. She flat out murders the FBI agent when he tries to rescue the sister she kidnapped, no hesitation, no remorse. But then she dithers and dawdles and turns into 'blindly loving older sister'. She does nothing else, the whole movie. She takes no actions after tying up the desk clerk. Nothing. She isn't even sassy and defiant anymore. It's like the director forgot what her character had been in the opening scenes.Which might be what literally happened, for all I know. Drew had a lot on his plate, too much maybe.
The desk clerk is revealed at the end to be some kind of super soldier marksman. But he doesn't act like a war vet earlier. This feels like a plot and character twist Drew made to finish up his story. He didn't go back and add in elements to make the person at the end feel like the person at the beginning. Fixable problem, fix wasn't attempted.
The FBI agent first follows orders, then doesn't. And he doesn't act like an Agent. Again, plot contrivance and unneeded complexity. I talked about the vacuum cleaner box, which draws more attention to himself than is needed but then he draws even more attention to himself by 'playing' a loud and demanding salesman who somehow seems to know more about the El Royale than the desk clerk does. Why would someone do this if they're trying to keep a low profile? If he's going to go rescue a girl, against orders, why wouldn't he secure and tie up the kidnapper before untying the girl? Why wouldn't he secure the pistol and dagger that he DID see through the two way glass? (I give him a pass on not seeing the shotgun) Why didn't he go back to the payphone and call the State Police and say 'I'm an FBI Agent, badge number 1234, I need ten state police here to help me with a kidnapper.'? It's all plot contrivance, actions taken by a puppet and not a real person.
The final confession of the dying desk clerk is another missed opportunity. The last line of the rite of confession for Catholics is something like this: "May the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the saints, whatever good you do and suffering you endure heal your sins, help you to grow in holiness, and reward you with eternal life. Go in peace." Go in peace. What a beautiful way to send someone off who is dying. I've also heard this as 'Go now and sin no more'. I'm guessing Drew isn't Catholic. I'm also guessing he didn't spend the five seconds it takes to Google the Rite of Confession and work it into the final scene with the priest and the desk clerk.
Problem ultimate: Drew Goddard isn't willing to fuck the dog all the way. There's a great quote the magnificent writer Shanon Peavey brought to my critique group, back when it was still around: If you're going to fuck the dog, stick your dick all the way in. Gross as that is, it's ironically relevant to this movie, almost literally.
In a scene where the desk clerk is talking about 'all the awful stuff I've seen', he mentions a man 'lying with a wolf'. Now, what are you visualizing, in this internet age were furries and bestiality is all out there online? Pretty terrible, isn't it. Only Drew can't quite bring himself to stick his dick in there. He backtracks in the movie and says 'it wasn't sexual, but it wasn't NOT sexual'. Wishy washy bullshit. And seriously, the worst he's seen is a Senator (because of course it was a senator) beating a whore, fornication and that guy sleeping with a tied and chained wolf. That's it. No rape, no murder, no drug use, no cannibalism.
Everything is implied, he won't come out and show us or tell us anything definitive.
Boots is shown as irredeemable, but we don't see the killing the cult performed. No murders. Did Boots do all the killing herself? Did Billy Lee order it?
Was Boots molested by her father? If so, why is she so clearly fixated on him? Is Billy Lee both father and sexual figure for her?
Did Emily murder her father? Does Boots know this? How many other people have Emily killed to murder the FBI agent without hesitation or remorse?
Drew isn't willing to let all of his characters be complex. The singer has to be completely perfect and a perfect victim who can redeem fake priest and use reverse psychology to get the addled desk clerk to 'snap out of it' and save them all. He isn't willing to make the cult's ideology real, isn't willing to make Billy Lee a full psycho.
He goes half way, letting 'Boots' be a very bad, feral child/woman. He kills off her older sister. I legit did not expect that. And that's just it. It's not all bad. It's got good stuff in there. Drew had assembled all the pieces needed to make a great suspense/mystery. But he fumbled the assembly. So let's look at how this could have been a great movie.
How could we it be fixed? Let me run through each problem and offer very, very simple ways to fix Bad Times at the El Royale. Most of these would not be extensive re-shoots or require much expense. Much can be done just at the script/dialog level. I'll go through each problem and suggest a brief solution.
Fix for Problem #1: Simply tell us the date. It can be as simple as a calendar in the opening scene. Done. We know when we are. For flashbacks, the few we keep, we can stick with the '10 years ago' or 'six months ago', etc.
Fix for Problem #2: The Management needs to be a lurking threat. Something to fear, something to deal with, even if just by getting away. The Solution is to just pick who Management is. Make it the Russians, fits the time period and reality. Or make it the FBI, which helps place our agent there and explains some of the weird orders he gets. It should be about more than just 'perverts', just decide what and go with it. I lean towards FBI with the plot as written. The discovery and revelation raises the stakes for everyone there.
Fix for Problem #3: Darlene has no tie to the location, the plot, the characters. She alone has no dark secret but she doesn't act like a normal innocent woman: stealing the FBI agent's gun after following him, seeing him take stuff out of car engines and seeing him get murdered. She clocks the priest without reason given in the movie. So the fix is simple enough: the third robber we see in the opening scene and in the flashback (if we keep it) is BLACK. She gets a line of revelation about that money being 'half hers', saying 'my daddy said there was money here but he never found it'. Or something like that.
Fix for Problem #4: Tying Darlene's father into the robber fixes half of her problem. The other half is her recognizing the priest. He needs to say something that resonates with her or slip up in some way. Or she sees the bottle of drugs in a mirror. Again, a simple dialog/script fix, combined with Darlene's backstory fix and this sudden attack doesn't come out of nowhere. We lose some of the 'shock' but we gain justification. We can even have the revelation come later, in the car or when tied up at the end, if we need that shock attack scene.
Fix for Problem #5 and 6: Runtime and jumping around. This is a complex fix. The biggest savings is to cut the flashbacks. We need the opening scene with the money being hidden. We can link that to the 'earliest' scene of the robbery, the accident, the priest's brother driving to the El Royale. We may need the flashback with Boots and her sister, her father and her father's murder. We can even keep the shooting and Vietnam flashbacks, as they are brief and true flashbacks and not whole new scenes. Cut all the rest. That gets us about 20 min of screen time back and it gives us a clean forward narrative: 10 years ago the robber, 10 years later we are back at the El Royale.
The rest of it is small snips and narrative choices as far as pacing. We have long, lovely camera shots. Those mostly have to go. Long scenes of Darlene singing and clapping, those need to go. We go from introductions, to discovery of the secret passage, to the kidnapping, to the murder, to the interrogation, to Billy Lee arriving. No more hard POV jumps between characters, the set up and introductions will have to happen real time and characters will be doing things simultaneously, cutting between characters but not changing scenes. That means Billy Lee is already on their trail, unknown to Boot's sister. Boot's betrayal will have to happen later, via dialog or we can just cut it. Boot's actions tell us enough without needing the phone call. It would be work but it would be doable and worth doing.
Fix for problem #7: Billy Lee. I actually like the idea of a cult leader who leads entirely on sex and charisma. The power and danger are baked in, because Hemsworth is not small or weak. But he needs a consistent ideology that ties into the script. So this is one flashback we, sadly, need to keep. Instead of him blathering about changing sides, we have him talking about how much e 'loves truth' and 'hates lies and liars'. He can even talk about the 'fairness' of chance in determining outcomes. How 'anything can happen in a fight', which ties into the fight over who gets to fuck him, which reveals about Boots' character and it ties into the final fight where the tables are literally overturned. You can even stick in something about how much he hates religion as 'full of lies', if you want. Honestly the priest not being 'real' would be enough to trigger Billy Lee. And if Darlene knows the priest is fake, she can even be the one to reveal that, under duress. And duress needs to be there. Threat needs to be there. Which means Drew needs to swallow his desire to deconstruct and preach his political religion and if he needs to give Darlene her 'powerful men who love to talk' speech...and I really, really would cut it...then you have to see that such a speech has no effect on Billy Lee. Have him shoot her, in the gut or the leg. And let him answer her defiance by raising the stakes, not undercut.
We also need to get Billy Lee into the story earlier. So we need to show the cultists arriving well before they bust in. Show them walking through fields or down hills, all pretty, then show the guns, then show the El Royale from above or in the distance. Keep the threat imminent. Remember, we're going for suspense and tight run time.
Fix for Problem #8: Unused plot hooks. Most of these we are tying up and using above. The FBI is the Management. That's why the conflicted FBI orders.
Who is on the tape? Here's a subtle way to tell without telling. Everyone but Darlene looks at the film. She's not interested. But every time the film is looked at or mentioned, have them glance at Darlene. Just a look, not a big look. The dialog in the movie is 'he's famous' 'he's dead' and it would be a big deal, be very valuable and...of interest to the FBI, at least at one point. So who is dead in, say 1970, who is already a legend, who's legacy would be tarnished by sexual indiscretions being discovered? Well...Martin Luther King comes to mind. You wanna talk bombshells. He fits the dialog in the movie and in a subtle way, it ties Darlene back into the plot some more, even if only by her race.
Who's the money stolen from and who's looking. Again, that's Darlene's father who backstabbed the other two thieves. If we want to use the FBI again, they investigate bank robberies. Switch it from an Armored Car heist to a bank robbery and add the money hunt to the FBI agents tasks there. Done.
Fix for Problem #9: Characters don't behave like real people. This is mostly just direction. Keep Dakota Johnson's character sassy and defiant and a cold eyed killer. Make her active, even if that means she's subverted in her intention to kill the desk clerk by her sister. The priest isn't enraptured by the singer's singing, or not only that, maybe there's some conflict between them instead of a hugbox. Let Darlene be conflicted, desperate, needing that money but maybe repulsed by what she has to do to get it. If the desk clerk is a war hero, let him act like it. Don't have him freak out about a tied up girl. If you need him to be passive, and I don't know why, then play up the drug addiction. Make it hard on him. Maybe Darlene's father died of a drug overdose, tying her to him. Have Darlene motivate him at the end by either their shared drug talk (which I'm making up, they never have any moments until the very, very end of the movie with her 'reverse psychology' moment) or by pleading with him to fight or save them or something other than 'you don't have to kill anymore' turning instantly into 'ok, I'll kill some more'. Give the FBI agent a reason to act so squirrel and impulsively due to the conflicts in his orders. Or have the little sister be the one to kill him or something like that. Not free and easy but easily fixable
Fix for Problem Ultimate: Fuck the dog. Go ahead and show the cult murdering the family in LA. Go ahead and describe actual fucked up shit that happens in hotels. When the desk clerk says he's killed '124 people', don't show us a Vietnam montage...show us the clerk killing 124 people at the hotel at the orders of The Management. This ties him into the FBI Agent as well. Show the red phone ringing, then him shooting a guest. Phone rings, another shooting. Phone rings, another shooting. Give him something to REALLY regret, not normal wartime killing, that can be traumatic for most people, but it's nothing he should feel religious guilt over. Make the incest (very slightly) more explicit, make the murder of his father more explicit. Or kill the desk clerk and have Emily kill Billy Lee only to have her little sister boots murder Emily in a rage. Don't pussyfoot around implying stuff, tell us and let us deal with it as a audience. Or if Drew isn't willing, or the studio more like, then cut and make changes. But this is a small picture, let it be honest and bolt.
So, if anyone actually read all this, thanks. I really wanted to love this movie. But I didn't. Sadly, I think it has all the ingredients for greatness, but they were not assembled to create that.
Not recommended.
I went into this movie really rooting for it. My final thoughts before the movie started was a prayer or wish: please be good. This was the first movie I'd seen trailers for that made me want to see it. By the way, whoever edited the first trailer for this movie did an awesome job. If only the movie that was teased in that trailer had show up here. There are good things here. I want to specifically call out the work of Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who knocked it out of the park. Jeff Bridges did yeoman work, giving his character more depth than was on the page. Chris Hemsworth has a shot at career outside of Thor and John Hamm is very solid in what he was given to work with.
What they were given to work with...sigh. That's the problem.
First a quick plot summary:
Four strangers meet at a cool 60's throwback hotel...sometime in the early 70's. (problem #1) The hotel is wired for eavesdropping and there are two way mirrors for filming the guests, all set up by the mysterious 'Management' (problem #2). One of the four is a singer, one is a priest, one is a salesman, one is a mouthy hippie chick. Most of them are not what they seem: the priest is actually an ex-con looking for money hidden by his brother here, the salesman is an FBI agent here to retrieve Bureau listening devices, the hippie chick has kidnapped her younger sister and the singer is a holy and blameless paragon of all that is good and righteous (problem #3). Add in a drug-addicted supposed ex-military desk clerk desperate to confess to a priest and then add a cult leader and his followers, come to retrieve the kidnapped girl and shake, but not well.
The specifics of the plot barely matter but here goes: the FBI agent discovers more surveillance stuff in his room than what he was set here to retrieve. This leads him to investigate, and he discovers the secret passages that show the two-way mirrors. It also shows the kidnapped girl tied up. He reports his findings to the FBI who, for plot reasons, tell him to disable all the cars and not to interfere with the kidnapping. He does the former, but doesn't do the latter. Breaking in and trying, incompetently, to rescue the kidnapped girl. The hippie chick kills him with a shotgun and the shot spray wounds the desk clerk who was behind the two way glass. The fake priest and the singer talk some, he has memory problems, and the room he picked did not have the money hidden in it. It is instead in the singer's room. He tries to drug the singer so he can search her room but she hits him in the head with a bottle (problem #4) and tries to run away. But can't, so she and the fake priest agree to split the money. They get the money but before they can get away, the cult leader shows up, ties everybody up, there is speechifying, and death and the movie ends with the priest and the singer getting away to Reno.
The movie jumps around in time and space (problem #5) and the plot is not told in linear fashion. If it had, it might have been a tight 90 minutes and not a bloated 2 hours, 20 minutes (problem #6). There is a lot of potential here, a lot of teasing ideas. But this is Drew Goddard's whole career in a nutshell: good ideas poorly executed. The guy just does not understand setup and payoff. He's half the creative staff of Cabin in the Woods, which has one of the worst endings I've ever seen in a movie. But I think what made Cabin in the Woods work was, and I hate to say this as a Joss Whedon hater, was Joss Whedon. For all my dislike of him as a person, Whedon at least understands character and setup and payoff. Drew Goddard does not.
But let's look at what worked, what didn't and how this movie COULD have been great.
What worked:
1. The support staff. Drew Goddard has writing, directing and a producing credit here. And the production side worked well. Art direction by Michael Diner and Lisa Van Velden is wonderful, sets and costumes are great and professionally done. I want to call out Seamus McGarvey's camera work again because he almost saves this movie. Rob Fournier as the Armorer, along with James Dever and the stunt crew, nailed the little gunplay there at the end. Take a bow, one and all, you were pros.
2. Key performances. Jeff Bridges deserves special praise. The script didn't always support him, particularly at the end, but he gives his character humanity and depth. Jon Hamm was solid, he needs to get more lead work. Chris Hemsworth can act in addition to just being hot, good news for him. Cynthia Erivo did very well for a first movie role. Cailee Spaeny as 'Boots' is believable as a child sexualized way too young and devoted wholeheartedly to Chris Hemsworth's Billy Lee. The rest of the cast are pretty much ok, though they aren't given much to work with, script-wise. Dakota Johnson is...pretty. Maybe she could have been better than that but she just isn't given a chance to be a good actress here. Or maybe she isn't one.
3. The tease. This is what we can give Drew Goddard credit for. Him and whoever cut that first trailer. There are promising ideas here: Who is recording the guests? Why? What does the cult leader want? (problem #7) Who is on the film? Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? Why is the FBI interested in this hotel? You've got the hooks to tell many interesting stories here. Sadly, most of them are unexplored or answered badly. (problem #8)
4. The music. If you like soul music, this is your movie. And if Cynthia Erivo is actually singing in this movie, she's a good singer. (not good enough to be magic, though. Problem #9) I like Deep Purple quite a bit so 'Hush' showing up with it's guitar work was quite a contrast to the harmony and vocals of the rest of the soundtrack. It's all very much like a Quentin Tarantino movie. But here's the problem there: Drew Goddard wants to be Quentin Tarantino in this movie. But he doesn't have the chops and doesn't understand what QT does well: scenes and character and doesn't understand what QT doesn't do well, namely tying scenes together to tell a complete story. So let's talk about what didn't work and we'll start with the problems one by one.
What didn't work:
Problem #1: This isn't grounded in a specific time. This is a problem because the movie jumps around in time a lot and because it's unwilling to put a specific day and year on it, the audience is confused and adrift. The El Royale used to be a big spot back in the 60's. So we apparently AREN'T still in the 60's, but everyone dresses like they are. J.Edgar Hoover is alive, Nixon is President, Vietnam is still going on but Watergate isn't in the news, so it has to be 1969-1972. There's some live TV with Nixon talking about how cease-fires doesn't work vs insurgencies (which is accurate, by the way), so if someone is really up on their game, maybe they can pinpoint the date from there. But the audience shouldn't have to work this hard. And, yes, the date matters. You can't just set stories in 'the past', if you want the audience to buy into it. Without that grounding, you are stacking the deck against yourself.
Problem #2: The Management is handled badly. Here we have a mysterious 'management' that has all the rooms wired for eavesdropping (11 pieces of equipment alone in one visually-memorable early scene), it has two way mirrors, secret passageways. Who are they? What do they want? Why was the hotel set up this way? What are the consequences of discovery of the Management's actions? NONE of this is answered or paid off. What we get is a handwave of 'What is this, a pervert hotel? Yeah, pretty much.' That's it. Nothing deeper. Just some P.O. Box where the desk clerk mails film. How does Management know who to film? No idea. It's a cool idea that Drew Goddard fucked up. (See Lost, which Goddard worked on)
Problem #3: Darlene Sweet has no dark secret and thus doesn't make sense. I'm putting aside the actress and her performance, which was fine, and I just want to talk about the character. Everyone else in here, from the kidnapped girl to the priest to the desk clerk is not what they appear. All except Darlene. She is just what she appears to be: a singer down on her luck. She also clocks the fake priest with a wine bottle, before she could reasonably know or before she's shown to be suspicious of him. She steals the FBI agent's gun. She doesn't try to call the cops from the pay phone. She does demand half the stolen money. She, in short, does not act like a normal woman. It seems like she, too, might have a secret dark side. But no. She is the holy and blameless paragon, bordering on the 'Magical Negro' trope. But that's not all, she's also the mouthpiece for Drew Goddard, who decides to have his #MeToo moment in a speech that brings the movie to a screeching halt. She gets to lecture all the men in the world and then gets to use some weird reverse psychology on the desk clerk to get him to shoot the bad guys. And in the end, she gets her money, gets her job in Reno and everything is happy even though she's not wearing her fake hair anymore. (By the way, she looked better with the wig on and with the long dress.) This is another missed opportunity to either treat her as a true innocent or to give her the same dark motivation everyone else seems to have. This leads into the next problem.
Problem #4: Darlene somehow figures out the priest isn't on the up and up and clocks him with a wine bottle. First and least, having seen people hit with beer bottles, which are smaller, a full bottle of wine doesn't shatter hitting someone in the head. It makes a dent. A big dent. It can cause concussions easily and death. It doesn't make pretty, tiny head scratches. This is just Hollywood bullshit though and can be ignored I suppose. More relevant is there there is no way she would have suspected the priest character. He hasn't given himself away. If anything, he's been kind, generous and open with her...more than anyone else in the movie and maybe her life. There is another handwave line by her that 'you've been used enough, you learn to recognize a user'. But that's just bad writing and directing. If that's true, then you should set that up. Setup and pay off, remember? You need to give her something to make her suspect him. Some slip up. Some reason to suspect that he is not just dishonest, but actually means her harm. Because she doesn't just avoid him, she fucking clocks him with a bottle and goes running out into the rainy night without taking her coat or even her shoes. NOTHING we've seen or she's seen would justify any of that.
Problem #5: The movie jumps around in space and time. One thing that's common for me in first drafts is that I'll write a lot of exposition, a lot of backstory. On second drafts, I'll cut almost all of that out and instead I'll weave that into the plot or reveal it through actions, or as a last resort, character dialog. Drew didn't do that cutting. As you can tell from the 2:20 run time. So we get the 'back story' of each character, jumping back in time for each character, sometimes repeatedly. When are we when we jump? No idea. the Priest's robbery takes place 'ten years ago' but that's the best we get. Each jump causes the audience to 'reset'. Suddenly the audience needs to figure out again, where we are, when we are, who's here, what's happening, etc. Tarantino did this a lot in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But he did it well and it always tied right back into the moment we left the main thread of the story. Drew doesn't do it smoothly and we instead are jarred time and again. And often, we don't need it. We don't need to see Darlene's backstory of being sexually harassed, it's enough for us to know she's a down-on-her-luck singer. We don't need to see the cult leader meeting and seducing the kidnapped 'Boots', we don't need to see half-abuse, half-murder implied scene with the sisters, we don't need to see the priest in jail getting his diagnosis. Pull all of those out and the movie still works. The problem is that the author is too close to his own words and loves them too much. I get it. But Drew clearly needs a collaborator that tells him what to cut and what to keep. He didn't get enough of that here. And that ties into the next problem directly.
Problem #6: The run time of this movie is two hours, twenty minutes. Unnecessarily complex, that's this movie in a nutshell. This could have been a tight, interesting 90 film. You can add a few minutes here or there as needed but there is no reason this movie should be this long. The flashbacks and the need to 'tell' rather than 'reveal' is part of the problem. But the unneeded complexity is the other part. For example, as a metaphor for the movie: the FBI Agent is masquerading as a vacuum salesman. Inside his huge, bloat, oversized sample box is...a fake vacuum. And under the fake vacuum is a secret panel. And in the secret panel is a briefcase. And in the briefcase is...lock picking tools. Just...normal snips and probes and tension bars that fit inside a normal leather pouch. You could just hide these tools in your luggage. Or why bother hiding it? Who's going to search his stuff? He might be undercover but he's not going undercover anywhere that Russian agents are after him. It's needlessly complicated. And the revelation is underwhelming. Much like the revelation of the spying windows, the movie camera, it happens either too early or too late, depending on the kind of story you're trying to tell. Know when to cut. Know when to trust your actors. Know what needs to be in your dialog and stage direction. Less is almost always more. Next time, Drew: start with a 60 minute cut, then see what you absolutely need to get to 90 minutes. This is a suspense movie, keep it tight, keep the audience in suspense. Flashbacks kill suspense, by the way.
Problem #7: The ultimate antagonist is confused in his motivation and his purpose in the plot. This is a problem with almost all the characters: they aren't real people. They don't act like real people, they don't want real people things. They are two dimension cutouts that mouth dialog, that's it. Billy Lee, played as well as could be by Chris Hemsworth, seems to be a cult leader who believes...well we don't know what his cult is based on, except that maybe it's based on the desire of everyone to fuck him. Which it might be. There are weirder cults out there. And his sexuality, not his threat of violence, seems to be what ties people to him. But what does his cult believe and how does it tie into the plot? We don't know. Chris makes a vague statement about how much he hates being forced to choose between two things, like right and wrong. And yet...he makes the tied up guests choose red or black in the end. It doesn't make sense for his theology, for lack of a better term, because his character and his worldview isn't developed. He's given too much screen time or not enough depth in what he is on camera for. Why is he asking for 'the truth' about who everyone is and where the money came from? Why does he care? His theology isn't about truth or hatred of lies or deception, though it easily could have been. He demands answers because the author put those words in his mouth, not because they would come from them naturally.
In contrast, take the Usual Suspects, written by Chris McQuarrie and directed by gay pedophile Bryan Singer. This is my favorite movie of all time, so I'm biased, but everyone in that movie feels real. They way they talk, what they talk about, what they care about or who...it all feels natural. That's good writing. Even the bad guy in the Usual Suspects is clear enough in his motivations to be the antagonist for the main characters.
Your protagonists are only as good as their obstacles. The struggle to get a nickel out of sewer grate so you can buy some candy isn't much of a story. A bad guy who gets defeated by shoving him down, isn't much of an antagonist. A cult leader who gets cut off and verbally shut down by a tied up prisoner...isn't much of a threat. I know it made Drew feel good to broadcast his Virtue Signal but it gutted his already thinly-motivated bad guy, Billy Lee. And a bad guy who is emasculated isn't a threat and your victory over him means little. If Princess Leia had snapped her fingers at Dark Vader or slapped him and survived, then it makes Vader look weak and not terribly interesting as an opponent.
Problem #8: Unanswered story hooks and wasted opportunities. Some of this I'll touch back on in the 'how it could have been great' section below. And I already mentioned how The Management was mis-handled. But there's more than that here that isn't explored or answered satisfactorily. One is the film. A big deal is made over this film of someone having sex, but we're not told who it is. All we're told is that it's a guy and he's now dead in today's time...whenever that is. He's important and famous, easily recognizable. And the line is said by Billy Lee that 'sometimes the legend of the man lives on after he dies' or something like that. Who is it? The movie doesn't say. I suppose it should be left to our imagination but...it's not really an interesting revelation, is it? It could be. What if it's JFK? Well, everyone today knows that JFK would and did fuck everything that moved. So that's not much of a revelation, maybe not even much of one back then. So who is it? Well, it's vague for no good reason and it's a missed opportunity.
Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? This is another handwave. The Priest said 'it doesn't matter, no one's looking for it' and 'everyone else is dead'. Which is such a missed opportunity it's laughable. It's basically removing a plot thread and a possible antagonist right off the table. Now I get that we're already running long (in the movie and in this review :) ) and you need to manage your characters and plot. But the money is the prime motivation for one, maybe two characters. It should be given more respect, be higher stakes, more valuable and more interesting. It should be what people are fighting over. Again, I have a suggestion that would be an easy twist to tie it all together. But we get no one and nothing about who backstabbed the thieves in the first place. And, keep in mind, that is the inciting incident of this whole movie. And it's tossed away and never exploited.
Why is the FBI here? Seriously, this pervy hotel has been around and spying on people for year. Did the FBI know about that? Is the FBI 'The Management'? (What an easy fix that would make.) If the FBI doesn't know about it, does it care? Why or why not? What does the FBI intend to do about any of it? Why is the FBI, which has direct jurisdiction over kidnapping, not interested in a kidnapping? No idea, any of it. Once Jon Hamm is dead, he means nothing to the plot. Stupid and a waste, again.
Problem #9: Characters in this movie are not believable. This mostly isn't a dig on the actors performances, again, with few exceptions, I believe they acted the way the script and plot demanded. This is a failure of writing and directing. For example, despite a very strong performance by Jeff Daniels, I don't believe that his thief character is SO entranced by Darlene's singing that it's some legendary gift, worth surrendering half of 'his' money and worth defying wacko cultists over. I just don't buy it.
The kidnapper, Dakota Johnson's Emily character starts out sassy and defiant. She flat out murders the FBI agent when he tries to rescue the sister she kidnapped, no hesitation, no remorse. But then she dithers and dawdles and turns into 'blindly loving older sister'. She does nothing else, the whole movie. She takes no actions after tying up the desk clerk. Nothing. She isn't even sassy and defiant anymore. It's like the director forgot what her character had been in the opening scenes.Which might be what literally happened, for all I know. Drew had a lot on his plate, too much maybe.
The desk clerk is revealed at the end to be some kind of super soldier marksman. But he doesn't act like a war vet earlier. This feels like a plot and character twist Drew made to finish up his story. He didn't go back and add in elements to make the person at the end feel like the person at the beginning. Fixable problem, fix wasn't attempted.
The FBI agent first follows orders, then doesn't. And he doesn't act like an Agent. Again, plot contrivance and unneeded complexity. I talked about the vacuum cleaner box, which draws more attention to himself than is needed but then he draws even more attention to himself by 'playing' a loud and demanding salesman who somehow seems to know more about the El Royale than the desk clerk does. Why would someone do this if they're trying to keep a low profile? If he's going to go rescue a girl, against orders, why wouldn't he secure and tie up the kidnapper before untying the girl? Why wouldn't he secure the pistol and dagger that he DID see through the two way glass? (I give him a pass on not seeing the shotgun) Why didn't he go back to the payphone and call the State Police and say 'I'm an FBI Agent, badge number 1234, I need ten state police here to help me with a kidnapper.'? It's all plot contrivance, actions taken by a puppet and not a real person.
The final confession of the dying desk clerk is another missed opportunity. The last line of the rite of confession for Catholics is something like this: "May the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the saints, whatever good you do and suffering you endure heal your sins, help you to grow in holiness, and reward you with eternal life. Go in peace." Go in peace. What a beautiful way to send someone off who is dying. I've also heard this as 'Go now and sin no more'. I'm guessing Drew isn't Catholic. I'm also guessing he didn't spend the five seconds it takes to Google the Rite of Confession and work it into the final scene with the priest and the desk clerk.
Problem ultimate: Drew Goddard isn't willing to fuck the dog all the way. There's a great quote the magnificent writer Shanon Peavey brought to my critique group, back when it was still around: If you're going to fuck the dog, stick your dick all the way in. Gross as that is, it's ironically relevant to this movie, almost literally.
In a scene where the desk clerk is talking about 'all the awful stuff I've seen', he mentions a man 'lying with a wolf'. Now, what are you visualizing, in this internet age were furries and bestiality is all out there online? Pretty terrible, isn't it. Only Drew can't quite bring himself to stick his dick in there. He backtracks in the movie and says 'it wasn't sexual, but it wasn't NOT sexual'. Wishy washy bullshit. And seriously, the worst he's seen is a Senator (because of course it was a senator) beating a whore, fornication and that guy sleeping with a tied and chained wolf. That's it. No rape, no murder, no drug use, no cannibalism.
Everything is implied, he won't come out and show us or tell us anything definitive.
Boots is shown as irredeemable, but we don't see the killing the cult performed. No murders. Did Boots do all the killing herself? Did Billy Lee order it?
Was Boots molested by her father? If so, why is she so clearly fixated on him? Is Billy Lee both father and sexual figure for her?
Did Emily murder her father? Does Boots know this? How many other people have Emily killed to murder the FBI agent without hesitation or remorse?
Drew isn't willing to let all of his characters be complex. The singer has to be completely perfect and a perfect victim who can redeem fake priest and use reverse psychology to get the addled desk clerk to 'snap out of it' and save them all. He isn't willing to make the cult's ideology real, isn't willing to make Billy Lee a full psycho.
He goes half way, letting 'Boots' be a very bad, feral child/woman. He kills off her older sister. I legit did not expect that. And that's just it. It's not all bad. It's got good stuff in there. Drew had assembled all the pieces needed to make a great suspense/mystery. But he fumbled the assembly. So let's look at how this could have been a great movie.
How could we it be fixed? Let me run through each problem and offer very, very simple ways to fix Bad Times at the El Royale. Most of these would not be extensive re-shoots or require much expense. Much can be done just at the script/dialog level. I'll go through each problem and suggest a brief solution.
Fix for Problem #1: Simply tell us the date. It can be as simple as a calendar in the opening scene. Done. We know when we are. For flashbacks, the few we keep, we can stick with the '10 years ago' or 'six months ago', etc.
Fix for Problem #2: The Management needs to be a lurking threat. Something to fear, something to deal with, even if just by getting away. The Solution is to just pick who Management is. Make it the Russians, fits the time period and reality. Or make it the FBI, which helps place our agent there and explains some of the weird orders he gets. It should be about more than just 'perverts', just decide what and go with it. I lean towards FBI with the plot as written. The discovery and revelation raises the stakes for everyone there.
Fix for Problem #3: Darlene has no tie to the location, the plot, the characters. She alone has no dark secret but she doesn't act like a normal innocent woman: stealing the FBI agent's gun after following him, seeing him take stuff out of car engines and seeing him get murdered. She clocks the priest without reason given in the movie. So the fix is simple enough: the third robber we see in the opening scene and in the flashback (if we keep it) is BLACK. She gets a line of revelation about that money being 'half hers', saying 'my daddy said there was money here but he never found it'. Or something like that.
Fix for Problem #4: Tying Darlene's father into the robber fixes half of her problem. The other half is her recognizing the priest. He needs to say something that resonates with her or slip up in some way. Or she sees the bottle of drugs in a mirror. Again, a simple dialog/script fix, combined with Darlene's backstory fix and this sudden attack doesn't come out of nowhere. We lose some of the 'shock' but we gain justification. We can even have the revelation come later, in the car or when tied up at the end, if we need that shock attack scene.
Fix for Problem #5 and 6: Runtime and jumping around. This is a complex fix. The biggest savings is to cut the flashbacks. We need the opening scene with the money being hidden. We can link that to the 'earliest' scene of the robbery, the accident, the priest's brother driving to the El Royale. We may need the flashback with Boots and her sister, her father and her father's murder. We can even keep the shooting and Vietnam flashbacks, as they are brief and true flashbacks and not whole new scenes. Cut all the rest. That gets us about 20 min of screen time back and it gives us a clean forward narrative: 10 years ago the robber, 10 years later we are back at the El Royale.
The rest of it is small snips and narrative choices as far as pacing. We have long, lovely camera shots. Those mostly have to go. Long scenes of Darlene singing and clapping, those need to go. We go from introductions, to discovery of the secret passage, to the kidnapping, to the murder, to the interrogation, to Billy Lee arriving. No more hard POV jumps between characters, the set up and introductions will have to happen real time and characters will be doing things simultaneously, cutting between characters but not changing scenes. That means Billy Lee is already on their trail, unknown to Boot's sister. Boot's betrayal will have to happen later, via dialog or we can just cut it. Boot's actions tell us enough without needing the phone call. It would be work but it would be doable and worth doing.
Fix for problem #7: Billy Lee. I actually like the idea of a cult leader who leads entirely on sex and charisma. The power and danger are baked in, because Hemsworth is not small or weak. But he needs a consistent ideology that ties into the script. So this is one flashback we, sadly, need to keep. Instead of him blathering about changing sides, we have him talking about how much e 'loves truth' and 'hates lies and liars'. He can even talk about the 'fairness' of chance in determining outcomes. How 'anything can happen in a fight', which ties into the fight over who gets to fuck him, which reveals about Boots' character and it ties into the final fight where the tables are literally overturned. You can even stick in something about how much he hates religion as 'full of lies', if you want. Honestly the priest not being 'real' would be enough to trigger Billy Lee. And if Darlene knows the priest is fake, she can even be the one to reveal that, under duress. And duress needs to be there. Threat needs to be there. Which means Drew needs to swallow his desire to deconstruct and preach his political religion and if he needs to give Darlene her 'powerful men who love to talk' speech...and I really, really would cut it...then you have to see that such a speech has no effect on Billy Lee. Have him shoot her, in the gut or the leg. And let him answer her defiance by raising the stakes, not undercut.
We also need to get Billy Lee into the story earlier. So we need to show the cultists arriving well before they bust in. Show them walking through fields or down hills, all pretty, then show the guns, then show the El Royale from above or in the distance. Keep the threat imminent. Remember, we're going for suspense and tight run time.
Fix for Problem #8: Unused plot hooks. Most of these we are tying up and using above. The FBI is the Management. That's why the conflicted FBI orders.
Who is on the tape? Here's a subtle way to tell without telling. Everyone but Darlene looks at the film. She's not interested. But every time the film is looked at or mentioned, have them glance at Darlene. Just a look, not a big look. The dialog in the movie is 'he's famous' 'he's dead' and it would be a big deal, be very valuable and...of interest to the FBI, at least at one point. So who is dead in, say 1970, who is already a legend, who's legacy would be tarnished by sexual indiscretions being discovered? Well...Martin Luther King comes to mind. You wanna talk bombshells. He fits the dialog in the movie and in a subtle way, it ties Darlene back into the plot some more, even if only by her race.
Who's the money stolen from and who's looking. Again, that's Darlene's father who backstabbed the other two thieves. If we want to use the FBI again, they investigate bank robberies. Switch it from an Armored Car heist to a bank robbery and add the money hunt to the FBI agents tasks there. Done.
Fix for Problem #9: Characters don't behave like real people. This is mostly just direction. Keep Dakota Johnson's character sassy and defiant and a cold eyed killer. Make her active, even if that means she's subverted in her intention to kill the desk clerk by her sister. The priest isn't enraptured by the singer's singing, or not only that, maybe there's some conflict between them instead of a hugbox. Let Darlene be conflicted, desperate, needing that money but maybe repulsed by what she has to do to get it. If the desk clerk is a war hero, let him act like it. Don't have him freak out about a tied up girl. If you need him to be passive, and I don't know why, then play up the drug addiction. Make it hard on him. Maybe Darlene's father died of a drug overdose, tying her to him. Have Darlene motivate him at the end by either their shared drug talk (which I'm making up, they never have any moments until the very, very end of the movie with her 'reverse psychology' moment) or by pleading with him to fight or save them or something other than 'you don't have to kill anymore' turning instantly into 'ok, I'll kill some more'. Give the FBI agent a reason to act so squirrel and impulsively due to the conflicts in his orders. Or have the little sister be the one to kill him or something like that. Not free and easy but easily fixable
Fix for Problem Ultimate: Fuck the dog. Go ahead and show the cult murdering the family in LA. Go ahead and describe actual fucked up shit that happens in hotels. When the desk clerk says he's killed '124 people', don't show us a Vietnam montage...show us the clerk killing 124 people at the hotel at the orders of The Management. This ties him into the FBI Agent as well. Show the red phone ringing, then him shooting a guest. Phone rings, another shooting. Phone rings, another shooting. Give him something to REALLY regret, not normal wartime killing, that can be traumatic for most people, but it's nothing he should feel religious guilt over. Make the incest (very slightly) more explicit, make the murder of his father more explicit. Or kill the desk clerk and have Emily kill Billy Lee only to have her little sister boots murder Emily in a rage. Don't pussyfoot around implying stuff, tell us and let us deal with it as a audience. Or if Drew isn't willing, or the studio more like, then cut and make changes. But this is a small picture, let it be honest and bolt.
So, if anyone actually read all this, thanks. I really wanted to love this movie. But I didn't. Sadly, I think it has all the ingredients for greatness, but they were not assembled to create that.
Not recommended.
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