Hotel Artemis seems destined to come and go from theaters without making much of a ripple. The $15 million-dollar sci-fi neo-noir opened at #8 with only $3 million and change, roundly routed by Sandy Bullock and her girls. But I had an absolute blast with this movie, so I figured it might be worthwhile to yell a little about how much I enjoyed it. Even if you do end up missing it in theaters (and I get it, man. They sandwiched this thing between a month of Star Wars and superheroes and a month of dinosaurs…and superheroes), if your taste for pulp runs similar to mine, I have a feeling that Hotel Artemis is going to become new comfort food.
Hotel Artemis centers around a very bad night at the titular establishment, a semi-mythical hotel/hospital operated by and for criminals. It’s a hot summer’s day in 2028, and riots are sweeping through LA. While the streets simmer, a bank job goes wrong and the heist’s mastermind (Sterling K. Brown) drags his injured brother (Brian Tyree Henry) to the Artemis for treatment. Already there are an obnoxious arms dealer (Charlie Day) and a high-priced assassin (Sofia Boutella). Tending to this motley cruel is the dogged, agoraphobic Nurse (Jodie Foster) and her hulking but soft-hearted assistant, Everest (Dave Bautista).
Tensions are already high, and they only get higher when Crosby Franklin (Zachary Quinto) calls to inform the Nurse that his father, the “Wolf King” of Los Angeles, is coming.
And as if that weren’t enough, a cop (Jenny Slate) turns up on the doorstep, begging for help.
To try and give you a sense of why I clicked with Hotel Artemis so hard, let me ask you one thing: You ever read Richard Stark? I mean, technically Richard Stark was just the pen name used by Donald Westlake, but the books written under the Stark moniker are their own special breed of noir, distinct even from Westlake’s other work. Books bearing the Stark-mark centered around a single protagonist, a thief by the name of Parker (you’ve seen the first Parker novel adapted a couple times, as Point Blank and then again as Payback. There have been others, including a rancid attempt by Jason Statham to turn the books into a Transporter cast-off franchise for himself). Parker is the coldest, most ruthlessly efficient criminal to ever stomp out of the pages of pulp, and Stark’s prose was every bit as reserved as his leading man. Everything is pure function. With each book, Stark/Westlake inserted his leading man into some new heist or scenario, then loaded up the supporting cast with a huge variety of colorful, mercurial criminals to help or hinder him, and then let the situations build to full boil.
With Hotel Artemis, writer/director Drew Pearce (probably best known for co-writing Iron Man 3 [aka the best Iron Man movie, come the hell at me Manchurian-stans]) displays a similar ruthless efficiency, and a similar ability to paint memorable characters with broad brushstrokes. As a writer, Pearce knows how to use a line of dialogue to convey more emotional information than pages of monologues; and as director, Pearce knows how to keep all the individual stories within the Artemis humming along at a steady clip until it’s time for everything to collide and explode.
For this kind of tight, economic storytelling to work, everybody needs to be on board. Thankfully, every member of the assembled ensemble came to play. Boutella and Brown are all slinky cool and movie star charm, each actor being instantly believable as the hyper-competent badass they are playing. Day and Quinto both take palpable glee in playing to the back rafters, with Day in particular channeling the kind of coked-out freak energy you’d expect from one of Gary Oldman’s villain turns in the 90’s. Bautista meanwhile continues to wring a ton of mileage out of the odd intersection of hulking man-mountain and gentle teddy bear that he inhabits, especially as he continues to get more and more confident as an actor. Bautista is most often paired with Slate and Foster, and that gentle soul earns those relationships a ton of goodwill. It’s an act of kindness on the part of Foster that starts a whole mess of trouble, and as things escalate to deadly, you want to believe that that kindness will be rewarded instead of punished, that the bonds forged by desperate people in desperate circumstances are no less real and will see them through the very bad things that are amassing.
That brings us to Foster. She’s been offscreen since 2013’s Elysium (which was…not a…great showcase) instead focusing her energies on directing. But Foster remains an indelible screen presence even after all this time, and as “The Nurse” she instantly gravitates to the center of the film. Even buried under make-up to exacerbate her age, those are still Clarice Starling’s eyes peering at you, and just as with that film, you instantly feel protective of Foster and want to see her pull through this world of darkness. Foster moves through the film in a near-permanent flinch, for reasons that are slowly but steadily. Suffice to say, guilt and grief have trapped her in a near-permanent daze, but even so, she can’t turn off the parts of her that give a shit. In a movie that is unafraid to go to silly and stylish places, there’s a rawness to Foster’s work that should be out of step with the larger-than-life atmosphere. But it works because Pearce weaves those emotional beats into the plot elements of his propulsive thriller. That’s harder to do than it looks (think about how many blockbusters you see where the human, emotional beats feel completely removed and disconnected from the bombastic, action beats, as if two different creative teams made two distinct movies and then slapped them together) but Pearce and Foster carry it off.
Look, I’m not going to try and convince you that Hotel Artemis is some genre-defining masterwork. Its scope is small, its ambitions modest. But Hotel Artemis is exactly the kind of smart, adult-minded thriller that we’re always complaining don’t get made any more. And thanks to cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, the film feels intimate, but never cheap. In a summer season defined by ‘more is more’, Pearce and his collaborators have demonstrated that, as ever, you don’t need inexhaustible budgets to deliver the goods, just good actors given the chance to play with good material.