#47: Hotel Artemis

This is like Atomic Blonde + Fury Road + John Wick, but if those movies were not as great as they are.

 I'm only assuming John Wick is great. Haven't seen it.

This will be a more spoilery review that you're used to here - mainly because you can predict every damn thing that happens - and you don't feel clever for doing so. Just kind of indifferent. 

The year is 2028 - It's pretty much identical to the present day.

• Corporations own basic needs and let Americans perish.
• There are explosions in the sky above Los Angeles.
• Jeff Goldblum is here.

However! There's a bunch of cool sci-fi shit, like AI that basically makes nurses obsolete - except one.

Welcome to Hotel Artemis - Staffed by two people with fake names and occupying several more people with fake names, it's a hospital for assassins, thieves, and criminals.

It's not Universal Health Care, though, you have to pay a subscription to get cared for. Some things never change.

The characters are all reasonably entertaining with colorful pasts that are only hinted at - except two one of them. And unfortunately, that is the most boring backstory ever.

The problem with Hotel Artemis is that the conflicts are extremely contrived;

But before we get there, let's run down the people whose character names I barely remember.

Charlie Day's character is just a rich asshole who doesn't have the paper-thin connections to the other characters that they have to each other so they have to force him in at places.

Sterling K. Brown (Waikiki) and Sofia Boutella (Nice) know each other and probably would have been romantically involved but "The job", and that's all you need. Also, I'm glad Sofia seems to not die in this movie. That’s been an annoyingly recurring theme for many of her movies lately, and oftentimes she’s the only female character, so it’s very...fridge-y. Way to switch it up, sis!

Dave Bautista as Everest is probably my favorite person here, a somewhat gentle giant.

Jodie Foster as The Nurse has what turns out to be a weak and convolutedly connected backstory to The Wolf King of LA ("Silly name," She says. She's not wrong), played by Jeff Goldblum.

The King has a really irritating son played by Zachary Quinto and I don't think he's ever even named.

Jenny Slate is a non-entity. It's like someone said "We need a person to evoke THIS feeling" and they wrote her character in.

The conflicts are thus;

Nice has to kill The Wolf King because she was paid to. That's about it.

The Wolf King is patient number one because he set up The Nurse in the Hotel to act as a hospital after she was driven to self-destruction after her son was found dead because he stole a car of The Wolf King but she doesn't learn that until now. Unsurprisingly, nothing comes of that.

Jenny Slate is a cop that knew The Nurse when she was a child, and that's how she's allowed to get medical help - but Waikiki sees her, and criminals (and anyone with sense, though the two parties don't overlap often) know not to trust cops...and that's the end of that. Really. He gives a warning about not letting her been seen by The King's men, it doesn't happen, and that's that.

Nice ends up killing The Wolf King...and Waikiki's brother, who was on life support, though the latter was on accident.

Also, Charlie Day gets killed via having his head crushed by a 3D printer. It's kind of cool.

It looked fine, I guess. On a set design level, it stood out. Kind of like an unfamiliar 70's aesthetic. The score was pretty interesting at points, but often blended in.

In short; The setups are shit and the payoffs are non-existent, but you can see people have some fun.