Metacritic reviews

The more that Goddard upends our assumptions about who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s going to live through the night, the more we realize that we’re rooting for all of these fucked-up people to get right with the world. It’s massively didactic, but in a way that encourages us to dwell on how we feel about these characters, and how malleable those feelings are.

Bad Times at the El Royale may overstay its welcome a bit, and it never realizes the potential of its villain, but it’s still an engrossing, well-made crime flick bolstered by several fine performances from its ensemble cast.

Though not as unpredictable as the preceding two hours (and nowhere close to the dizzying final act of Cabin In the Woods), the resolution is still a lot of fun, straight out of a thrilling dime-store novel you’d keep by your bedside table.

With Bad Times at the El Royale Goddard’s comparatively leisurely pace may disappoint the more impatient, splatter-hungry genre-hounds in his fanbase, but for the rest of us, he has made impressive, enjoyable and gorgeous-to-look-at work of his “difficult second album” by defying expectations in a different way: broadening his scope, deepening his craft and letting the Bad Times roll.

Bad Times at the El Royale is vibrant motion picture, in a way few films are nowadays. One might even call it indulgent, although “decadent” is probably more accurate.

If the film isn’t quite as inventive as the game-changing horror that was Cabin in the Woods (which boasted Joss Whedon as co-scripter), it’s infused with affection and craft.

Unlike the director’s debut feature The Cabin In The Woods, Bad Times At The El Royale isn’t a deconstruction of the neo-noir genre so much as a structurally ambitious example of same.

There’s ample amusement in the twists, betrayals and revelations that unspool. But Bad Times never really transcends the inherent limitations of its setup; it’s fun, but fleeting.

It's great to look at, nearly giddy with pop-culture love, and its particulars are intriguing. But those pieces — by turns weird, soulful and exhilarating — merely accumulate, when they should be generating magic.

At two hours and 21 minutes, this 1969-set period thriller is taxingly slow and almost oppressively self-indulgent, constantly backtracking and replaying already-drawn-out scenes from multiple perspectives.