HOTEL ARTEMIS (Drew Pearce). 108 minutes. Opens Friday (June 8). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Like the best pulp treasures, Hotel Artemis is gritty, thrilling, funny and a hell of a good time. It’s the kind of movie you’ll want to go and see before your friends can spoil all the best parts.
Making his feature directorial debut, screenwriter Drew Pearce – who co-wrote Iron Man 3 and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – does what all the best pulp filmmakers do: he establishes a world, introduces some characters, defines their conflicts and immediately complicates the hell out of everything.
The setting is a near-future Los Angeles during a chaotic riot, where an assortment of anonymous, wounded people arrive at the eponymous location – a secret hospital for criminals who can afford membership – and almost immediately find themselves at each other’s throats.
It’s Reservoir Dogs meets John Wick during The Purge, with a dream cast of pros including Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Dave Bautista, Sofia Boutella, Charlie Day and Zachary Quinto and a couple of people I am reluctant to name, in case you haven’t seen the trailer. (I hadn’t, and it’s a good strategy.)
Pearce makes the most of a modest budget, limiting the action to a handful of locations but making sure everything plays out in the most interesting manner possible, with a running motif that pairs characters up in isolation but keeps shifting the pairings, so Foster gets a quiet moment with almost everyone and Brown and Boutella can build an intriguing love/hate thing between big fights.
The big fights, when they come, are similarly well executed a hallway standoff late in the picture is one of the most satisfying things I’ve seen this year.
