One of the most underrated thrillers of the 21st century is best described as Pulp Fiction meets The Hateful Eight, and the movie itself is a love letter to the Quentin Tarantino style of filmmaking. These movies exploded shortly after Tarantino’s breakout film, Pulp Fiction, in 1994, and most of the copycat films didn’t match up to anything Tarantino was doing at the time. A movie needs to be entertaining and not just ape Tarantino’s style.
A movie that did just that came out 24 years after Pulp Fiction, and it included a strong mix of Pulp Fiction and Tarantino’s 2015 release, The Hateful Eight. The movie is called Bad Times at the El Royale, and it was directed by Drew Goddard. Anyone who followed Goddard’s career should have known that this was going to be a special movie, but it ended up falling short at the box office, making only $31.8 million on a $32 million budget.
The movie follows a group of people who end up at the El Royale, a once-popular hotel on the California-Nevada border. However, as the strangers all check in on this fateful night, each of them is hiding something that comes to light as things at the hotel grow violent. The cast was stacked, it was a great Tarantino homage, and it deserved a much better reception than it received when it was released.
Bad Times At The El Royale Is A Great Tarantino Homage
Drew Goddard proved himself as a writer with movies like Cloverfield and The Martian, but in 2011, he showed his skills behind the camera with the fantastic meta-horror movie The Cabin in the Woods. Despite that movie’s brilliance, Goddard has only directed two films to date. That second movie, released in 2018, was Bad Times at the El Royale. Written and directed by Goddard, this is a neo-noir thriller film.
It also shares a lot in common with Tarantino’s movies. First, there are similarities between this film and Pulp Fiction. Both movies have flashbacks that tie the story together like a puzzle, and the two movies are well-paced, with characters all dealing with their own personal dark pasts. There are also shocking moments of violence, which is another comparison between the two.
However, it also has a strong connection with The Hateful Eight, which was a Tarantino movie that sees a group of outlaws and bounty hunters who end up trapped at a small rest stop in his 2015 Western. Instead of a Western outpost, this takes place in an old hotel, but both have untrustworthy and questionable characters, all gathered together with disastrous and deadly results.
The Cast Of Bad Times At The El Royale Is Stacked
Another way that Bad Times at the El Royale compares to Tarantino’s movies is that both are full of incredible actors, all wanting to work with the filmmakers. Chris Hemsworth got an early career role in The Cabin in the Woods, and he returns here in a small role as a cult leader named Billy Lee, a man whose cult puts everyone in the hotel in great danger.
The main cast is also a who’s who of Hollywood talent. Jeff Bridges is Father Daniel Flynn, a priest with a dark secret. The character the audience follows through the film’s story is a singer named Darlene Sweet, played by Cynthia Erivo. Dakota Johnson is a hippie named Emily Summerspring, and Jon Hamm is a traveling salesman named Laramie Seymour Sullivan, who might actually be hiding his true identity.
The rest of the cast includes Lewis Pullman as the hotel manager, Cailee Spaeny as a cult member, and Nick Offerman as a bank robber. In the end, this is a great neo-noir crime movie that is comparable to a Quentin Tarantino movie, but that wasn’t enough.
Bad Times At The El Royale Deserved Better
Bad Times at the El Royale didn’t make back its budget at the box office, and it ended up with just a 75% Rotten Tomatoes score, though it was still enough to be Certified Fresh. The audience score is an equal 75%, but this is a smart movie with a great cast by a filmmaker who should be directing more movies than he is.
The Cabin in the Woods received much higher critical praise, but the audience score was close to the same as Bad Times at the El Royale, which still remains puzzling. Both movies took familiar genres (the slasher genre and the Tarantino-style crime genre) and did something fresh and unique with them. Both movies deserved more success than they received, and both deserve a second look.
- Release Date
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October 4, 2018
- Runtime
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142 Minutes
- Director
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Drew Goddard
- Writers
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Drew Goddard