Review: Hotel Artemis (2018)

Hotel Artemis (2018)

Rated R for violence and language throughout, some sexual references, and brief drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

Hotel Artemis is a film that's powered more by style than substance and has a lot more ideas than it can properly convey in its feature-length runtime, but when the journey was this stylish and intriguing, I'll take it. It's at once a crime thriller and a near-future dystopian sci-fi movie, the two sides held together, with only partial success, with world building that seems designed to evoke the John Wick films and their larger-than-life criminal underworld. It's a film that really felt like it should've been a TV show or even an open-world video game, formats where it might have had more room to really build out the sprawling, complicated world that writer/director Drew Pearce envisioned. What we get instead is a small-scale, closed-setting crime drama that excels largely on the strength of its atmosphere, its characters, and their respective actors, enough to make up for a fairly jumbled and predictable storyline once you get past the set dressing. You've probably seen most of this movie before in a more grounded setting, but even so, if you're a fan of these sorts of crime movies, you're in for a little treat with this one.

The most important "character" in the film is the Hotel Artemis itself, a once-glamorous Hollywood hotel that has seen better days... much like the city of Los Angeles. The year is 2028, and the city is plunging into the most furious riots in its history over the privatization of its water supply. The Artemis, overseen by a doctor known as the Nurse (Jodie Foster) alongside her orderly/guard Everest (Dave Bautista), now makes its business as an underground hospital for the city's gangsters and assassins, and tonight, it's an island of tranquility amidst the chaos outside. Multiple people are currently staying at the Artemis, each one known only by the name of their suite (which are themselves named after cities) so as to protect their identities. Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown) and Honolulu (Brian Tyree Henry) are two brothers who exploited the chaos of the riots to rob a bank, only for it to go wrong and leave Honolulu badly injured. Acapulco (Charlie Day) is an arms dealer and grade-A asshole. Nice (Sofia Boutella) is an exotic assassin and an old flame of Waikiki's. And also, a terrifying crime boss known as the Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum) is on his way to the Artemis for treatment, while Morgan (Jenny Slate), a police officer who knows the Nurse, has been badly injured in the riots and is desperately seeking her help.

Over the course of the film, their stories will all collide with one another, and rarely to the film's benefit. The only real central "arc", so to speak, is that of the Nurse, real name Jean Thomas, a woman whose medical career and personal life went down the tubes after her son died from an overdose, leaving her with a bad case of agoraphobia. The film often feels like it's trying to go for the disjointed feel of a film like Pulp Fiction that's about multiple characters whose lives all intersect and come together into a single story, but it never fully pulls it off, in no small part because not every story comes together. While Waikiki and Nice have their connection, and both turn out to be connected to the Wolf King early on, the Nurse never has much to do beyond be an observer in their story while she's off doing her own thing. Her connection to the Wolf King is only revealed in the third act, and until then, there was little connective tissue between her and the rest of the cast. As such, for most of the film the plot feels like it's meandering constantly, jumping between two threads whose connection isn't immediately apparent, and the connection we do eventually get is in the form of a twist that manages to feel both predictable and contrived. Acapulco, meanwhile, exists only to be the comic relief who gets shit on for most of the film, while Morgan is mostly a plot coupon in the Nurse's arc. It felt as though Pearce had several good ideas for a story, but no real way of bringing all of them together. When I said that this would've worked better as a TV show, I said it suspecting that this film had, in fact, been initially conceived as such, and that Pearce took the plots of multiple episodes and mashed them together into an incoherent mess of a story.

Where this movie really grabbed my interest was in its aesthetic. It's set in the near future, but outside the bank robbery prologue and a few scenes set outside the hotel, it's a very retro vision of the future, combining pieces of modern technology (especially the Nurse's medical equipment) with the vintage glam of the hotel, together with a worn-out "used future" look indicating that everything in the film, from the characters to their equipment to the hotel itself, is not exactly in tip-top shape. Watching this with some friends, I was telling them that Pearce would be a good pick for a BioShock adaptation, and that that game must have clearly had some influence on Pearce as he was crafting this film's world. Other reasons why I made that recommendation include the fact that the good look is not just skin-deep; Pearce manages to shoot brutal violence and the big third-act action scenes with aplomb, and before then, he put a lot of work into getting me invested in the characters. While most of the cast (Charlie Day as a comedic asshole, Sofia Boutella as an ass-kicking hot chick, Dave Bautista as a tough guy, Sterling K. Brown as a crook with a heart of gold) is playing to type, they're all really good at playing those types, crafting a cast of interesting characters even when the script wasn't pulling its weight. Jodie Foster, meanwhile, gets the meat of the film to herself, playing a tragic figure haunted by her past who is trapped in the Artemis in more ways than one, longing to overcome it and break free. While the twist involving her past felt contrived from a story standpoint, it did a very good job at resolving her story, and Foster sold the hell out of it. Jeff Goldblum also put a fun twist on his usual "type", his Wolf King making for a crime boss who feels just a bit "off" in such a way that you know he's hiding something important.

The Bottom Line

It's very uneven and kind of throwaway, but it still gets my recommendation for fans of crime movies and the actors involved, especially those looking for a bit more style.