Hotel Artemis (2018)

Walking out of the theather after seeing Hotel Artemis I felt numb. This type of numbness hadn’t yet happened in 2018, so I felt a little shocked. After I had time to digest this feeling of nothingness, I decided that I was still going to review Hotel Artemis. Because if I had suffered through a really bad movie, I might as well trash it on my blog.

There is no easy way to say this, but Hotel Artemis is trash. It’s an attention seeking trash movie with big names, that waste their talent on something pointless. We have Jodie Foster, an Oscar winner, walking around a hotel that serves as a hospital for criminals – and nothing happens! Sure, things happen, people die, and futuristic medicine is introduced, but I have never been so bored in my life.

How a movie that is set in a futuristic world loose itself so magnificently right from the beginning? Easy: shitty writing. That is all there is to it, and while the visuals and the acting can do so much, there is no way those two things can hold up a story if the story is crap. A heist goes wrong, two brothers end up in Artemis, one is wounded badly, the other not so much. While the hotel manager/nurse starts to batch them up, bunch of other guests show up. Including the owner of the hotel aka the big bad mob boss. But oh wait, it’s a trap, because somebody was hired to kill him.

Then a whole lot of other stuff happens, some flashbacks to Foster’s past are shown, but honestly, they end up nowhere. All while Charlie Day keeps talking, while nobody really wants to listen. Including the viewers. While the plot itself is promising, the idea of it all good on paper, and the execution at times works – as a movie, Hotel Artemis fails completely.

No Guns, No Cops, No Killing The Other Patients

First of all, it’s hard to care about any of the characters. No offence to Sterling K. Brown, but his character was so empty and pointless, there was no desire to root for him. Sofia Butella, while stunning in action sequences (her countdown was the only good thing about Hotel Artemis), was given almost nothing to work with, and even her storyline was left unfinished! Dave Bautista was hired to play human Drax. Jeff Goldblum got to be on screen for 5 minutes, while high on drugs (the character, not Jeff). Jenny Slate shows up at one point, but there is literally no need for her to be there. And Zachary Quinto’s character was so cliché that even his moustache was sighing with embarrassment.

So to say I didn’t enjoy the film is an understatement. There was a moment during the movie where I thought to myself that Fifty Shades of Grey was better than this, because at least I was able to laugh at it. Hotel Artemis takes itself so seriously, it thinks it’s doing a good job telling a compelling story. It’s visually ambiguous. It tries so hard, that it trips over itself in the very beginning, falls, and never manages to get up on two feet again.

In conclusion, Hotel Artemis is a bad movie. There is no other way to put this. It’s bad because it doesn’t really demand our attention. It has weak character development, and some characters don’t even get a complete storyline. We have a bunch of big names to lure us in, but nobody really knows what they are doing. And frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing spending so much time reviewing this movie, while all I want to do is forget that Hotel Artemis ever existed.