Review of Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) by Kirollos-Noah — 24 Jan 2019

First of all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and I really want to congratulate you, 'cause we made it out alive! Finally 2018 is done with its disappointing movies! It really was hard to choose the best 10 movies with 5 honorable mentions, it was a very poor year for movies, and I hope 2019 be better than it. Anyways, it was very hard to choose, yeah! But Bad Times at the El Royale is definitely one of the best movies of 2018!

Bad Times at the El Royale is directed and written by Drew Goddard, and starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Hemsworth, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson and Cynthia Erivo.

Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe's El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption... before everything goes to hell.

I missed this one in theaters, so when I went to buy it when it came on Blu-ray, I didn't know anything about it but its poster. It was a very good experience to see a movie without knowing anything about it!

I found it really unique, stylish, smart and attractive, it still has flaws, but let's start with the good things about this movie:

Let's start with the direction, Drew Goddard did an amazing job, I really loved how it was twisted and shot, it has one of the best cinematography of the whole year! He also did a great job with the script as well, only sometimes it gave that impression "huh?!" But afterwards I got it!

Let's move to the amazing, talented and beautiful performances, everyone was so convincing, I found no mistake with the performances for the whole duration of the movie! BTW the duration was so fitting for this story, though it was 2h 20min I wasn't bored at all! Drew Goddard knew how to make a fascinating, hooking and attractive movie! Chris Hemsworth is a great Thor, and he can also be a great villain as well.

Now let's go to the best thing of the whole movie: THE STORY! It's so twisted -but not confusing- very hooking to the very end, and very rewatchable as well. I won't go so deep about it, to not to spoil anything to you in case you didn't watch it.

As I said, it's an amazing movie, but still flawed, so let's move to the flaws of this movie:

First of all the first scene of the movie, the death of "the guy", it's not very obvious who and why did he kill him at all, I was like "They will explain this any minute now... Wait for it!" But nothing happened!!!

Secondly and lastly as well, the character of Chris Hemsworth, people were treating him like a god, I know why, but it's not that convincing for me, there is a scene when we get to know everything about it, in that scene I wanted to see more, to get to know more about it, but unfortunately, I didn't!

So Bad Times at the El Royale is a very good movie, memorable, twisted and well shot, it has lots of things that I needed to watch in this disappointing year.. still flawed, so I'm gonna give it an A-!

Alright, guys.. happy new year, and thanks for reading my review, and if you liked it, you can click on my name up above to see all of my reviews.