Hotel Morality

In trying to sum up the crazed, immortal Satanic cult dwelling in a ritzy New York hotel, Zazie Beetz's character in 2026's They Will Kill You at one point simply describes them as "rich people." This is par for the course when it comes to the intellectual level of the film's social commentary. Mostly it's an unabashed Quentin Tarantino pastiche with some incredible fight scenes and a few appreciably wacky, dark moments. I only wish the screenplay were a little smarter.

Beetz plays Asia Reaves, a young woman who goes to prison for ten years for shooting her father. Once she's released, she goes on a quest to find the little sister she'd been forced to leave with the abusive old man. This leads her to the Virgil, a labyrinthine art deco hotel in garish mustard yellow, saturated brown, and chili pepper red. One impressive fight scene later, chock a block with dismemberment, she discovers the hotel's denizens are immortal and they all want to kill her.

All the snap zooms and forefronted rock and hip hop songs really make it seem like Kirill Sokolov has watched Kill Bill vol. 1 at least ten thousand times. But while the Bride's extreme martial arts proficiency is explained by a backstory of intensive and often painful training, Asia's prowess is put down just to her having been in prison. This seems like a failure of imagination but there are lots of lapses of logic in the story, too. When Asia first gets to her room in the hotel, she sees eyes watching her in the air vent. She goes outside the room, looks around the hall, and the lights go out. When they come back on, she goes back to her room and goes to bed, apparently not caring that there's eyes watching her behind the vent, despite the fact that it'd made her scream and fall back on the ground moments before. Later, when an opponent plants a knife in her back, Asia breaks a mirror and uses it to see the knife while she uses a bookcase to get under the knife's handle so it's pulled out when she steps forward. Why doesn't she just pull it out with her hand? I have no idea. It's like the screenwriter thought the main character was going to be a turtle. Was this originally a Ninja Turtles script?

In terms of the social commentary, it's your standard lazy "rich white people versus poor black people." Unsurprisingly, the director is a rich white guy. He's from Russia, which may explain his meagre insight.

Zazie Beetz, who was the best part of Deadpool 2, is excellent in the action scenes and I really enjoyed the climactic battle. Heather Graham and Patricia Arquette are also in the movie.

They Will Kill You is available on HBOMax.