Bad Times at the El Royale

 For whatever reason -blame the aggressive marketing push, or the terrible title- I only now got around to watching Bad Times at the El Royale. I should have had more faith in Drew Goddard and the amazing cast he assembled. It's no revelation, and it does like to ramble... but it's an extremely solid, fun, twisty as hell neo-noir.

 El Royale is a fancy hotel near Lake Tahoe, straddling the state line between California and Nevada. That's the hotel's Vegas-like gimmick; they've drawn the state line on the ground, and where it bisects the building the styles change slightly - especially where the color palette is concerned; Seamus McGarvey's cinematography and an excellent production design (Martin Whist, with Michael Diner and Lisa Van Velden in art direction) are a huge factor in why the film works as well as it does.

Warm | Cool

 After a short, 1959-set introduction where a man stashes a bag under the floorboards on one of the rooms, the film jumps ahead a decade to a fateful day when a bunch of strangers arrive at the hotel.

 It's a motley bunch: A priest (Jeff Bridges, making full use of his raspy affability). A young woman lugging huge swathes of bedding around (Cynthia Erivo, whose gets a surprising amount of chances to show off her incredible singing voice). A callous vacuum salesman (Jon Hamm, hilarious in full motormouth mode). A taciturn hippy (Dakota Johnson). After crossing paths in the lobby with each other and the concierge (Lewis Pullman), they head off into their own rooms and their own subplots. Chris Hemsworth will put in a late appearance that makes great use of his rock-star charisma and good looks.

 It's an episodic tale that takes more than a few left turns and seems determined to include all those signifiers of the death of idealism in the sixties; Vietnam, Nixon's ugly mug (and a few Watergate-evoking shenanigans), cults and the Manson killings, the era's casual racism and chauvinism. It's all done with... well, not subtlety, but a surprising amount of care and treated with a seriousness I did not expect from watching the trailers. It's more Coen brothers than second-generation Tarantino knock-off.
 I don't want to oversell it - it's still a pulpy, knowingly ridiculous movie, but it's a serious ridiculous movie.

 Director Drew Goddard does an impressive job of weaving a large amount of stories into a coherent narrative using a load of visual prompts - he also wrote a very solid script that manages to veer in all sorts of wild directions - the seeming premise of the hidden bag is just one subplot here, one that quickly gets subsumed by everything else going on at the hotel. It has an unfortunate tendency to sprawl, though; I can't help but to think the film's almost-two-hours-and-a-half runtime could have easily be trimmed by thirty minutes or so. But I guess the flab goes well with the almost pyncheon-esque abandon the script grafts new ideas in.
 And the the flashback structure, which is one of the biggest offenders in inflating the film's length, pays off in a big way near the end, providing context to a previously underdeveloped character in a manner that's both revealing and affecting.

 The acting is superb all around, the filmmaking propulsive, the sets gorgeous and the constant twists... umm, twisty. It might not be as clever as it thinks it is, but it's clever enough, and a ton of fun besides.