Global Road Entertainment. 2018. Thriller. 94 minutes.
The spirit of John Carpenter is summoned onto the multiplexes with so-so results in Hotel Artemis, a dark, claustrophobic and occasionally attention-grabbing pastiche that reps the directing debut of screenwriter Drew Pearse. The most arresting element of this near-future urban actioner is not its elevator-pitch of a story nor the decaying, art deco-trappings of its titular hotel, but rather 2-time Oscar winner and national acting treasure Jodie Foster, top-lining as a nurse who runs a secret, members only hospital in Los Angeles for injured criminals. She’s the best reason to sit through this passable programmer that never transcends the low-budget, Reagan-era dystopian thrillers that inspired it.
It’s hard to say what drew Foster, who hasn’t appeared in a feature film in five years, to a role that doesn’t play to her strengths. Or why she decided that this material was worthy of her trying something off-brand. Initially referred to only as The Nurse, Foster’s character has been holed up for 22 years as the only doctor at the Hotel Artemis, a secret hospital for criminals in need of immediate medical attention. And as the year is 2028 and Los Angeles is in the throes of a full-blown, citywide riot, there are lots of criminals. The unrest has something to do with the shutting down of the city’s water supply, but the idea remains undeveloped, denying the world the possibility of a dystopian sequel to Chinatown. The urban warfare playing out on the streets is the perfect cover for an opening-scene armed robbery, one that quickly goes south. The job’s leader is Sherman (Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown) who we’re supposed to like because he’s the only character who says, “thank you.” Sherman, along with his brother, Lev (Brian Tyree Henry) are badly injured during the failed heist and stagger to the hotel for treatment.
First-time director Pearse, who received a story credit on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and wrote Iron Man 3, makes it easy on himself by setting a majority of the movie inside the hotel, thereby allowing Hotel Artemis to enter the pantheon of films set predominantly in one place. On the spectrum of movies set in a single location, Pearse’s film lands close to 2016’s Free Fire yet far away from high-end, one-location classics like Das Boot, Glengarry Glen Ross and Exterminating Angel or experiments like Rope, Locke or My Dinner with Andre. That said, production designer Ramsey Avery fashions a dingy, art deco haunted house whose rooms are named after cities with sunnier climes and loaded with enough high-tech medical gadgetry to make it plausible The Nurse could run the facility by herself, including a 3D printer that can create internal organs and, when creatively utilized, dispatch bad guys.
Along with a tragic backstory that will explain how she wound up the agoraphobic, hard-drinking caretaker of a hospital for criminals, The Nurse has some muscle. He is Everest, a “health care professional”, played by David Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) in another gentle giant performance that further convinces us he will someday play Lenny in a stage revival of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. For both Everest and The Nurse, it’s a busy night at the hotel: aside from Sherman and Lev, the other guests are an arms dealing douchebag (Charlie Day) and a sleek, high priced hit woman (Sofia Boutella) with a romantic connection to Sherman. There is also a wounded cop (Jenny Slate, receding next to Foster) suffering in an alleyway outside the hospital and The Nurse has to decide whether to let her in and break one of the facility’s cardinal rules. Pearse keeps these slightly interconnected, slightly engaging pulp storylines humming and he cleverly keeps tension levels high by constantly teasing the imminent arrival of a big bad crime boss known as Wolf King. He is played by Jeff Goldblum, in a performance that screams, “I had five days free in my schedule and I’d love to work with Jodie Foster.” Still, watching two old pros go at it is a pleasure, as Wolf King and The Nurse reveal their tragic shared past from which payment is forever extracted.
Hotel Artemis maintains interest, if not investment, for those predisposed to the urban doom and gloom of films such as Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, John Wick (whose “hotel for criminals” concept could have been the spark here), Judge Dredd and, just a theory, 1932’s Grand Hotel. Although in that star-studded MGM classic, “nothing ever happens”, here much happens, one just wishes it weren’t happening to Jodie Foster. Normally such a controlled, thoughtful and intelligent presence, Foster is loaded up with exterior business like frizzy grey hair, a hard to place (possibly New Jersey, possibly Boston) accent and a shuffling, grandmotherly gait. While such choices are justifiable (anyone escaping a tragic past by hiding for decades in a secret medical facility populated by L.A.’s most dangerous will surely go bonkers) the result is still her most external performance, one that’s dispiriting to watch.
The one film Pearse could have taken his cue from is 2011’s The Raid, the ridiculously violent (and ridiculously fun) blood-soaked, battle-happy free-for-all. Whether to avoid a harder-R that could turn off older curiosity-seekers or to keep the difficulty and the expectations reasonable for a first time director, Pearse’s film lacks that elevated level of anarchy that a more maniacal director could have delivered. B-movie convention should be the familiar foundation from which a movie like Hotel Artemis can take off, not a weight that keeps it stuck on the ground floor.