YMMV / Bad Times at the El Royale

• Award Snub: While it was always a long shot, quite a few people bemoaned the film's lack of Screenplay nominations including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination. Also, some people can feel Jeff Bridges and Lewis Pullman should have received Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominations amongst the Oscars for their endearing performances. Praise for Cailee Spaeny as Rose should've also been given too.
• Catharsis Factor: After how cold-blooded and murderous he was and how he pretty much destroyed Rose with his Mind Rape and sexual manipulation, it's pretty satisfying when Billy Lee is shot in the head by Miles. Really, the sequence where Miles grabs a gun and wastes Lee's entire cult in less than a minute after being the Butt-Monkey for most of the film is extremely cathartic, start to finish.
• Complete Monster: Billy Lee is a sadistic and psychopathic cult leader who seduces abuse victim Rose Summerspring into becoming one of his devoted, fanatical followers. He instructs her to prove her loyalty by brutally, fatally stabbing an innocent doctor, who helps homeless people that Billy Lee looks to followers for, along with the doctor's wife. Billy Lee also has her and another girl in his cult fight and nearly kill each other in exchange for another sexual favor. When Billy Lee shows up at the El Royale to retrieve Rose, he takes her sister Emily, Father Daniel Flynn—really robber Donald "Doc" O’Kelly—singer Darlene Sweet and concierge and former Vietnam sniper Miles Miller all hostage and forces Emily and Miles to play roulette for their lives, coldly killing Emily when she loses. He also demands Darlene sing to avoid playing, and when she does, he puts her at risk anyway, callously claiming that he's "heard better". He then tries to kill Flynn when he gets free and fights back and after Miles kills Billy Lee, the still-brainwashed Rose mortally stabs Miles before she's shot dead herself.
• Creepy Cute: Rose Summerspring may be violent and disturbed, but she's still very endearing. It helps that she's quite possibly more a victim of child abuse and Billy's manipulation than evil of her own volition.
• Cry for the Devil: It's hard not to feel sorry for Rose despite her violent tendencies, considering that she's (probably) only as cruel as she is because Billy Lee has brainwashed her into his psychotic attack dog.
• Cult Classic: The movie underperformed at the box office at the time it came out, but still has a niche following despite that—to the point that anyone who has seen it considers it highly underrated and sings its praises.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Jeff Bridges' character suffering from Alzheimer's is a lot sadder two years later after this film when Jeff announced he was diagnosed with lymphoma.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Chris Hemsworth co-stars with Jeff Bridges, who played the titular character in The Big Lebowski. In Avengers: Endgame, after Thor has become lazy and taken to wearing a robe, resembling Bridges' character in that film, Tony Stark jokingly refers to him as "Lebowski".
• Jerkass Woobie: Emily, while pretty abrasive and murdering Broadbeck and planning to kill everyone else at the El Royale to keep them from talking to the police, was a victim of child abuse by her father and is very protective of her sister Rose, who she tries to rescue from the manipulations of Billy. She dies realizing that Rose cannot be saved.
• Love to Hate: Billy Lee is so charismatic that you sometimes forget that he's the leader of a murderous cult.
• Magnificent Bastard: Father Daniel Flynn, formerly Donald "Dock" O'Kelly, once planned a daring heist of an armored car. Spending ten years in prison before being paroled, Flynn, disguises himself as a Catholic Priest, also fighting and overcoming memory loss due to mental-illness, then goes to the El Royale Hotel where his brother and partner Felix hid the money before being killed. Realizing he's in the wrong room, Flynn attempts to drug singer Darlene Sweet for the purpose of getting her to pass out so he can access her room and when that doesn't work, Flynn tells her the story and offers her half of the money to help him get it. Flynn and Darlene divert attention while they find the money and Flynn then fights back against cruel cult leader Billy Lee. Flynn pretends to be a priest once again to help ease a troubled and wounded man to peace as he lays dying and flees with Darlene and the money, later showing up again to watch her perform at a show too.
• Moral Event Horizon: Billy crosses this when he forces the hotel occupants to play his roulette game and murders Emily.
• Padding: The scenes where Darlene sings in her room, while important, go on for much longer than they should.
• She Really Can Act: Dakota Johnson as Emily is a far cry from her role in Fifty Shades of Grey.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Who, or what, is 'Management'? Sullivan's segment indicates that someone has hijacked the FBI's surveillance operation at the El Royale, and seems to have Miles working for them too. However, whoever or whatever this third party is never appears or is otherwise revealed.
  • Not letting Broadbeck and Emily last long enough to fight Billy Lee in the climax given Broadbeck's status as an FBI agent and Emily's status as his nemesis feels a bit wasteful.
  • It would have been nice to get some context, or even a minor subplot, about who it was that killed Flynn's brother (perhaps a double-crossing partner, or Management, assuming they ran the hotel back then).
• The Woobie: Miles Miller, who was a Shell-Shocked Veteran of the Vietnam War who killed over a hundred enemies and suffers from PTSD after seeing the results of his actions and realizing that War Is Hell. He then went to work for the El Royale, where he was ordered by management to film various acts of depravity behind one-way mirrors, unable to do anything about them. He spends most of the film trying to confess to Flynn about the sins he's committed and arguably suffers the worst of the main characters as he gets shot and embedded with glass, throttled by Flynn, tied up by Emily, gagged by Billy's followers and is fatally stabbed by Rose with his body presumably being burned beyond recognition.