It’s rare to find a movie so packed with stuff, which simultaneously feels so thin. Writer/director Drew Pearce introduces the titular Los Angeles building, a members-only safe house providing emergency medical services to criminals, led by a woman known as The Nurse (Jodie Foster). Various clients—an arms dealer (Charlie Day), an assassin (Sofia Boutella), a thief (Sterling K. Brown)—bounce off of and around one another, and also try to avoid the rioting taking place outside, because it’s the year 2028 and water has been privatized and so on and so forth. The apocalyptic setting really has nothing to do with what’s going on inside the building, and feels like a desperate attempt to give the story thematic weight, just like the tragic back story for Foster’s fussy, agoraphobic Nurse. Despite feeling awfully similar to
John Wick’s Continental, this still could have delivered some down-and-dirty genre kicks, but it keeps getting too talky and self-important to let the action get rolling, with the notable exception of one showcase for Boutella. A penthouse ER for killers should be more fun than this.
By
Scott Renshaw