The hotel is a key setting for Hollywood’s fight sequences, which we argue are always determined and understood through spatial orientation and architectural setting. Offering both private and public spaces, the upscale hotel offers a compendium of the contemporary action film’s fight scenes in one locale. Foregrounding a compelling fantasy of extravagance and mobility, the luxury hotel fight is foundational to the resilience of action heroes such as John Wick or James Bond. Indeed, John Wick is unimaginable without the fictional assassin hotel, the Continental. But the action hotel fight is not singular. For instance, the hotel room fight scene in Haywire plays with the erotic secrecy of the clandestine hotel room meeting, whereas the expansive lobby in John Wick 3 becomes a multi-participant battlefield. We argue that the hotel fight is a notable, specific, and underexamined space in action cinema with a particular relation to propulsion and violent action anchored to concepts of luxury, erotics, and precarious service economies. Considering the concepts of luxury and class that shape both the service economies and the erotic charge of luxury hotels, we look at the fights that map and are mapped by these spaces. We consider the hotel fights in luxury hotels that play with liminal public/private spatiality to articulate the architecture of violent action. We focus throughout on John Wick’s Continental Hotel, but also draw on other key contemporary Hollywood action films and franchises that foreground luxury hotels as a character, setting, and choreographic element.
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Steenberg, Lindsay Coulthard, Lisa
School of Arts
Year of publication: [in press]Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-03-05