'El Royale' a Bad Time...Mostly

Somewhere in Bad Times at the El Royale is a great movie. The problem is it's buried in drawn-out scenes, too much ambition, and a letdown of an ending.

El Royale is a mystery of sorts with religious undertones wildly splashed against the backdrop of a convoluted, misguided (well, maybe) interpretation of the effects of war and political conspiracy. If this sounds like the most intriguing blend of ideas, don't get your hopes up. Turns out the mystery doesn't really need to get solved, and the political spying elements were only half-baked. Plot twists don't make up for lack of pacing, poor action sequences, and a messy, unfocused story direction.

It started rather interestingly, if not a little too slowly. Jon Hamm (my boy!) plays a vacuum salesman, except he's not really a salesman. He secretly works for the government in some capacity. He was sent to retrieve old wire taps in a particular room at the El Royale hotel. What he doesn't know is he is about to uncover a bigger scheme involving secret cameras and one-way mirrors in the hotel.

There are subtle hints early on that give away the time period and sense of the nation's pulse, and there clearly are allusions to the Vietnam War, spying during the Cold War, and Kennedy and Nixon. Oh yeah, and a cult that probably was berthed from Woodstock. Some would say the murkiness and subtext is where the film's cleverness comes through, but the problem is the amount of context and knowledge the writing demands the audience to understand going into the movie.

The religious themes - including the role of the priest (Jeff Bridges) and several redemptive moments or conflicts moralistic in nature - played a part in the interesting hodgepodge of character connections. Those who seem innocent have more to them than meets the eye. The ending includes a lot of shooting and blood, but otherwise, there's no great conclusion to make. Sure, there's a rhyme and a reason for who makes it out and how their redemption arcs conclude, but there isn't anything satisfying about the end of this movie. We as an audience are somewhat trolled into thinking there was a build-up to something better, but there was nothing worth waiting all that time for.

The action and minimal, slow-paced style are a mix of Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight and the movie Vantage Point that involved seeing the same event pieced together from several different characters' perspectives. In this case, several seemingly random characters assemble at the hotel, and various shocking events occur, but once we see a different character's pathway to that certain point in time, these events suddenly get fleshed out more clearly.

The bouncing back and forth to fill in missing details of character backgrounds was jarring and artificial. But at least it was informational enough to make an impact, especially with the clever cuts back to the present day.