Check in to violent ‘Hotel Artemis’
If you’re in the mood for an ultra-violent, mostly entertaining, well-cast, dystopian action film, you could do worse than writerdirector Drew Pearce’s “Hotel Artemis.”
It’s 2028 in Los Angeles, and the poor are shooting down drones and rioting in the streets because the “free water” has been turned off, and the LAPD is shooting people indiscriminately. Brothers codenamed Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown) and Honolulu (Bryan Tyree Henry) — after the hospital rooms they inhabit in the retrofitted art deco high-rise Hotel Artemis — are wounded and in need of the technology and talent of the agoraphobic medic known as “Nurse,” aka Jean Thomas (two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster).
Nurse’s only helper is a mountain of an orderly named — natch — Everest (Dave Bautista, barely flexing his acting muscles). Nurse has a 3D printer that can make you a new liver, as well as a vinyl turntable and a tape player slung around her shoulder, and the first tune we hear is, of course, “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas.
Membership is required to get into Hotel Artemis, and only criminals are allowed.
The hotel was founded and is funded by L.A.’s biggest, most feared mobster, aka the Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum). Also staying in Hotel Artemis is a loudmouthed arms dealer (a shrill Charlie Day) and a sexy assassin with a selfinflicted bullet wound named Nice, as in France (Sofia Boutella, speaking English along with some high school French). Nice is Waikiki’s former lover and only kills “important people.”
During the course of a bank robbery gone bad in opening scenes, Honolulu steals a fountain pen packed with precious yellow diamonds belonging to the Wolf King. The Wolf King, meanwhile, is also wounded and on his way to a room of his own in the hotel with his loose cannon of a son Crosby (Zachary Quinto), who commands a squad of murderous thugs. As the pill-popping, whiskey-slugging, grief-haunted Nurse, Foster is game for the film’s rat-a-tat, colorful and often profane dialogue, and she is at times a real hoot.
Making his feature film debut, screenwriter Pearce (“Godzilla,” “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation,” “Iron Man 3”) is good at the mayhem. But he lets Quinto and Day over-act egregiously. An electronica-heavy score by Cliff Martinez (“Drive”) and cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung (“The Handmaiden”) are a plus. The fight scenes are coherently staged and edited for a change. But on the minus side, frequent flashbacks to Nurse’s dead son are canned and maudlin, and some plot elements just don’t float.
You might say the main purpose of “Hotel Artemis” is to generate a sequel, even if the film itself is way too familiar, recalling everything from “Red” to the “Kingsman” films, to justify it.