You Can Check Out Anytime You Like

When it was in theaters last summer, Hotel Artemis slipped under my radar, which is not particularly difficult to do. It bypassed the attention of many others, too, however, and thereby failed to earn back its fairly modest production costs at the box office. Last week I saw a mention of it as an “overlooked thriller” of 2018 starring Jodie Foster; so, based on that description and without previewing the trailer I gave it a try. I was expecting a neo-noir crime drama, but encountered something rather different. The movie is set in 2028, which is enough to qualify it as science fiction. Near-future Los Angelinos are not happy. As the movie begins, a full-blown riot is in progress that makes the recent Yellow Jacket disturbances in Paris look like pleasant weekend social outings. (The riot was triggered by water rather than fuel, but in the movie as in life it is about more.) The police have lost control of much of the city and are losing more block by block. Hotel Artemis is just outside the expanding riot zone.

The Hotel Artemis is not a hotel but a kind of HMO for criminals. Members get treatment for gunshot wounds, stabbings, and other occupational injuries: no questions asked, no public records, and no notification of the authorities. The facility, while well-equipped and well-fortified, by design occupies an upper floor of an otherwise dilapidated building in a dingy part of town: the kind of building that pedestrians and drivers-by barely notice as they pass. It is run by Nurse (Jodie Foster), an agoraphobic but capable healer whose drinking had cost her a license and any employment in more conventional hospitals. She is assisted by the fiercely loyal orderly/bouncer Everest (Dave Bautista). There are rules, of course, as there must be for this to work: no guns, no police, no killing on the premises, and so on. A colorful set of patients already occupies rooms when Nurse gets a call to expect powerful crime lord The Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum) to arrive with a gunshot wound; he had provided initial financial backing for the Hotel Artemis.

What happens if members stop following the rules of the Hotel Artemis to an extent that Everest can’t handle? Down on the streets we see what happens when people stop following street rules. We learn that one of the patients (Sofia Boutella) plans to violate rule Number 1 by killing The Wolf King; she had self-inflicted her wound to pre-position herself to do just that. The Wolf King assumes rules don’t apply to him anywhere anytime, and one of the other patients stole diamonds from him, which is something he won’t tolerate. Nurse herself violates the “no police” rule by treating a wounded female officer she knew personally. Meantime the riots threaten to engulf the area. The social contract inside and outside looks wobbly.

If the Hotel Artemis in some respects seems something like the Continental Hotel in the John Wick movies, you aren’t alone in noticing this. In truth, there isn’t very much original in the movie taken piece by piece. The riots are reminiscent of The Purge. There is graphic violence of the sort we commonly see in 21^st century action movies. Everest as Nurse’s faithful Achates is a character type we have known know since…well…Achates. We have the amoral crime boss. We even have the more recent (but long past novel) trope of the 90-pound waif-like young lady who when completely unarmed is still able to beat up a herd of hardened 250-pound thugs. Nonetheless the pieces are assembled in an interestingly offbeat way with enough wit to make the movie worth a look.

Thumbs cautiously Up.