Foster gives this oddball thriller first-class first aid
Hotel Artemis
15 cert, 94 min
Dir Drew Pearce Starring Jodie Foster, Sterling K Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Dave Bautista, Charlie Day, Brian Tyree Henry, Zachary Quinto
Hotel Artemis, a near future thriller about an after-hours hospital for criminals, feels like a decent idea for a Netflix pilot squished into a somewhat compromised film. As the directing debut of Drew Pearce, a British screenwriter-producer who previously worked on Iron Man 3 and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, it showcases his fondness for tough talk, swift bursts of brutality and surprising tenderness beneath. Overall, Pearce drums up more than enough promise to make his next roll of the dice something worth betting on; if it’s paradoxical to argue that a let-down could keep on boding this well, so be it.
Set in 2028, the film posits a riot-torn Los Angeles where the privatisation of water companies has led to drought, revolt and rampant criminality: two brothers (Sterling K Brown, Brian Tyree Henry) attempt a raid on a bank vault that goes awry, and the absolute collapse of public healthcare means that only their underworld connections can save them.
Brown puts a call in to the titular hotel, which is managed by Jodie Foster’s good-hearted, grey-haired nurse with members-only discretion. He and his brother, admitted for surgery while the streets are ablaze, are not the only residents holed up there on an especially packed night: there’s also Sofia Boutella’s slinky assassin, Charlie Day’s arms dealer, Jenny Slate’s injured cop and a lunky-but-sensitive security honcho played with considerable charm by Dave Bautista.
Corralling all these characters into the single location Pearce has chosen is anything but a novel gimmick: think of the movie as Grand Hotel (1932) reopened to a disreputable steampunk clientele, and with the furnishings to match. The faded glory of the interiors, complete with art-deco sconces and painted friezes for each themed suite, make it an appealing hang-out as we’re puzzling out the allegiances and enmities at work. And in case there’s any danger of the plot idling, up pops a never-loucher Jeff Goldblum as the hotel’s owner, a crime boss called the Wolf King, who’s on the trail of pilfered diamonds that have snuck their way inside.
The short duration is Pearce’s main enemy. Precious effort is spent establishing characters – by a wearily sympathetic Slate, for instance – who are then packed off in no time, as the film consents to standard-issue pacing tactics (a ticking time bomb, a rattling mob at the gate) to stave off any fatigue. Pearce shows an awful lot more faith in his cast than he does in his audience, who might have settled in very happily for a season’s worth of this, or at least a less skittish third act. True, Boutella’s role is overfamiliar from her Atomic Blonde and Kingsman bad-assery, and Day is a bit much, but everyone else knuckles down to what they’re doing with much more thought than you usually get from such gimcrack genre fare.
Brown, from NBC’S drama This is
Foster, in her first role since 2013’s ‘Elysium’, proves once again how necessary it is to like her
Us, shoulders whole ragged chunks of the movie with redemptive grace. And Foster, in her first role since playing a catastrophic villain in 2013’s Elysium, proves once again how necessary it is to like her. As a jittery agoraphobe with a tragic back story – a son lost years ago to drug addiction, driving her need to heal and help those on the wrong side of the law – she pulls us in to the film on a human level, going Full Foster in close-up for the first time in years. She can’t save this beaten-up film altogether, but she manages some tip-top first aid.