Review of Hotel Artemis (2018) by Hector V — 22 Aug 2018

Hotel Artemis is an odd film. While most of its focus centers around a group of criminals struggling not to kill each other, an almost irrelevant, more interesting story lies outside the Hotel Artemis' walls as an afterthought. What does take place is a basic action film that's not painful to sit through but is by no means a good watch either.

The film's premise is solid, but it's been done better in short segments of the two John Wick films that probably came up with the idea before it. Here, the criminal ongoings in the hotel are tedious. Hotel Artemis plays coy to milk an okay amount of mystery as we wait for the shoe to drop, but when it does, it's nothing particularly exciting or new.

It doesn't help that the film meanders for a long time before and after things start going wrong. The four too many storylines comprising the film are shallow, frustratingly unfocused, and take almost random turns as the central plot demands them. The action and woefully misguided, forced dramatic moments suffer exponentially as a result.

The biggest problem with Hotel Artemis is its terrible, terrible dialogue-it's like an action movie from the 80's totally devoid of self-awareness. Even with its great talent, so many of the film's lines stutter out awkwardly, especially from the utter hokeyness wasted on Charlie Day's character. Sofia Boutella and Sterling K. Brown don't even get that luxury as they're lost amongst the rabble with shallow, generic characters trying to be interesting to no avail.

Only Jodie Foster is able to make lemonade out of these rotten lemons, thankfully playing the low-key lead of the film. Foster's reserved attitude is effortlessly charming as the mess going down in the hotel gets progressively worse and is really the one saving grace of the film. Jeff Goldblum's criminally brief stint as the Hotel Artemis' owner is also great, to nobody's surprise, but it's so short it's almost pointless.

If Hotel Artemis had played into its unintentional cheekiness or its promising dystopian setting, it may have been a more memorable, infinitely more entertaining time. Instead, it's a half-baked action movie with less than mediocre results.