Hotel Artemis

A great premise and a solid cast can only do so much for a film like this…

Taking place decades into the future, Hotel Artemis sees a world where water is scarce and far too expensive for the common people to afford, inciting riots and violence across the land just to get a single drop. With hostility and criminality at an all time high, one beacon stands above it all as a place where the injured can recover and the weary can rest their head…if you’re a criminal that is. Run by the aging Nurse (Jodie Foster) for the past twenty-two years, Nurse has made a business of patching up criminals and evildoers and giving them a place to lay low as they heal, safe from the outside world and fellow criminals alike. Helped by a mountain of an orderly named Everest (Dave Bautista), the pair does their best to accommodate their clientele at any hour for any reason as long as they follow a simple set of rules within the confines of the hotel itself. But when a botched robbery brings Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown) and his brother Honolulu (Brian Tyree Henry) to Nurse’s doorstep (everyone uses their room names instead of their real ones btw), they also bring with them a whole slew of trouble that Nurse and Everest must contend with before the riots reach their section of the city, or worse, before a mysterious client with a connection to Nurse’s past arrives to shake things up yet again.

Man, I was severely disappointed in this film, not gonna lie.

With an initial premise that harkens to the great mythology the John Wick franchise has devised in regards to their own interpretation of a hotel designed specially for criminals, Hotel Artemis’ take on this idea should have given the final product enough legs to stand on in order to put together some sort of serviceable storyline that does justice to the concept, but unfortunately, I don’t think it was in the cards to begin with. The first half hour or so could have fooled you though, what with all of the fun, near-future tech and world building being shown and the interesting and intriguing thought of a hotel that deals exclusively with the well-being of lawbreakers, but the second all of that excitement and bright lights fade, there’s not much left in terms of story, suspense, action, or character building.

Being a sucker for a good hook, I was more so surprised at how reined in the entire movie felt, as if all of the budget went to casting and the creation of the world, and then the script was kind of tacked on after the fact. It’s a perfect example of when a great idea doesn’t have enough substance to sustain an entire film, and why a fun and inventive premise just isn’t enough to carry a weightless script full of half realized scenes and unachievable dramatic and cinematic attempts at making the movie better than it seems, but ultimately ends up going nowhere. I was expecting much more and was given something much less, a travesty if only because the potential of this film seems to be hiding in the wings, waiting for a tag-in that was never coming.

The only real saving grace in this film is the great cast that does just enough with the material to not make the whole endeavor a waste of time. I didn’t particularly care about any given character or the different plights they all find themselves in (they are criminals after all), but the fact that pretty much all of the actors and actresses involved seem to give it their all with a less than stellar script helped me to at least enjoy seeing them up onscreen, especially when there wasn’t much else to hold my interest.

Nurse and Everest are by far the best parts of the film with Dave Bautista continuing to be the shining light in every film he’s in, and Jodie Foster giving an oddly satisfying performance that gives her and Everest the only real dramatic and emotional weight this script could have possibly pulled off. Their arc still seems a little on the “meh” side, but it still worked enough to warrant a passing interest in their tale. Other than that, Charlie Day and Zachary Quinto are just terrible in their thin, annoying roles, and Sterling K. Brown and Sofia Boutella are perfectly fine as two star-crossed criminals. It’s disheartening to see that with this type of talent a film like this wasn’t able to hit higher highs, but I guess everyone needs a paycheck every once and a while.

It’s a shame when an interesting movie such as Hotel Artemis pops up in theaters; you want to check it out because of its hook and the clear, minute attention to detail paid to the world these characters live in, but when most of the characters living in said world are bland and forgettable, when the action and any real sense of tension is non-existent, when the emotional beats are unearned and rather boring, and when the overall package is lacking as a whole, there’s not much else to write home about or recommend. Luckily, nearly all of the cast excels in making up for a thin, uneventful script, and the world the hotel lives in is quite interesting and unique, so based on these two strengths alone, Hotel Artemis just barely succeeds in what it sets out to achieve, but unfortunately leaves a whole lot of potential lying behind in a pool of its own patient’s blood.