ONCE UPON A TIME IN TAHOE.............TARANTINO'D TO DEATH IN "BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE"....

Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)     Wow, did this one ever bring back the mid 1990's.........

             I don't necessarily mean that in a good way..........

             What I'm remembering is the onslaught of dreadful, fake-Tarantino movies that arrived in the wake of "Pulp Fiction"...........

                Endless movies with ensemble casts, spewing out snappy one-liners about pop-culture garbage......prior to the inevitable moment when they all stop gabbing and pull out guns to shoot each other to smithereens.............

              Give me a break.........(and break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar.....which is something one of the characters in these movies would say, prior to having their brains blown out at close range.....)

             Which brings us to "Bad Times At The El Royale", which you could consider a warm-up to Quentin Tarantino's upcoming 1960-ish epic, "Once Upon A Time....In Hollywood"

               I'll say this much for writer-director Drew Goddard.......no crappy little barely-there indie filmmaking for this guy.......             

               He swung for the fences........putting together an overblown mixture of vintage Tarantino and a host of other directors he admires.......you can spot the homages to Sergio Leone, Terence Malick, and Francis Ford Coppola, among others..........

                 Goddard might have come up with a real barnburner had he stuck to Tarantino's nervous, in-your-face scenes and dialogue.......but he ruins the film's watchability by affecting Sergio Leone's stately, glacial pacing..........when the film should be gripping you, all it does it test your patience......

                For a film that's incredibly ambitious in its storytelling, production design .and characterization........the only thing it achieves by the end of its punishing  140 minute running time.....a sigh of relief that it's over.

               It's a 1969 and an oddball crew of strangers converge on a near-deserted, practically defunct Lake Tahoe resort.......in search of stashed money from an armored car robbery. Hours and dead bodies later, they're joined by a loathsome cult leader and his minions......and the long overdue carnage erupts......

                I can hardly describe how much I'd wanted to like this movie........the superb actors (Jon Hamm, Jeff Bridges, Cynthis Erivo), the stunning creation of the El Royale itself,.....(built with the California-Nevada border running right through it)......and some of the startling set pieces....(including the Vietnam War, I kid you not....)

               But Drew Goddard remains too stubbornly self-absorbed in his own homages to engage an audience.......his work looks more like a beautifully drawn painting than a film.  You can stand back and admire the sheer amount of craft and creativity that went into it........but that's about all the movie will allow you to do.

                A damn, damn shame. What a waste. It settles into nothing more than an extra-bloated version of a late 90's phony-Tarartino knockoff......even worse, paced like it's taking place underwater.
2 stars (**)

             

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