Bad Times at the El Royale is from Drew Godard, writer/director of the genre-bending, utterly insane, and extremely funny The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and is a similarly stylised cine-literate genre mash-up. However, whereas in Cabin, the twist upon twist upon twist had a cumulative effect, with the story getting better the longer it went on and the weirder things got, in Bad Times it's a case of ever diminishing returns. By the time we reach the end of the lengthy 141-minute runtime (more on that later), with everything and everyone shoehorned into neatly explained niches, the film has been shorn of its vitality, leaving one with an overriding impression of "meh". If Cabin was a genuinely new spin on a clichéd old story, playing with and subverting genre at every turn, Bad Times is singularly unable to free itself from the most oppressively derivative of its generic constraints.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/xETTR
Shout by Stephen CampbellBlockedParent2022-10-14T21:05:45Z
Derivative, predictable, and dull
Bad Times at the El Royale is from Drew Godard, writer/director of the genre-bending, utterly insane, and extremely funny The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and is a similarly stylised cine-literate genre mash-up. However, whereas in Cabin, the twist upon twist upon twist had a cumulative effect, with the story getting better the longer it went on and the weirder things got, in Bad Times it's a case of ever diminishing returns. By the time we reach the end of the lengthy 141-minute runtime (more on that later), with everything and everyone shoehorned into neatly explained niches, the film has been shorn of its vitality, leaving one with an overriding impression of "meh". If Cabin was a genuinely new spin on a clichéd old story, playing with and subverting genre at every turn, Bad Times is singularly unable to free itself from the most oppressively derivative of its generic constraints.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/xETTR