To start things off, I don’t necessarily hate or love Hotel Artemis. I’m okay with it. It’s a film you watch on a Friday night when you really have no other options at the movie theaters. The list of well known actors is enough to entice you to watch it. You have Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto and even Dave Bautista. The film had its quirky and good moments, but there were some major plot elements and structure issues that did not work well.
Not to mention that I got some serious John Wick vibes from the theme of the movie. If you have watched either installments of the John Wick franchise you know that Wick goes to a special hotel made discreetly for assassins, The Continental. It has the same idea as Hotel Artemis. Both hotels have a list of rules that must be followed, number one being that you cannot kill on hotel grounds. Whether these parallels are meant to happen, who knows.
Overall the film has some elements to it that didn’t work well. One of them being that the pacing of the storyline was taking too long to unfold. We don’t find out about the pen with a secret vault full of diamonds for a while into the film. On top of that, what we thought was going to be the major storyline for the film really isn’t and it’s disappointing. Instead, we get multiple little stories of each character that do not mesh well with one another and never fully develop. We have the two heist brothers who try to rekindle their bond, the small spark of love between a killer assassin and one of the heist brothers, an arms dealer who tries to prove himself, a wounded cop who is a face from the past, the mob king of L.A., and the nurse of the hotel who finds some peace in her son’s death. The main issue is a riot that happens in the streets of L.A. over clean water that causes the hotel some issues.
Individually the ideas for the characters were good, but they never developed into anything worthwhile for the film. The only person that you feel joy for is the nurse of the hotel, Jean Thomas (Foster) and Everest (Batista). She’s a woman in the right profession but in the wrong setting. Everest is the big scary guy who can pulverize you, but has a soft spot for the nurse and adds some comedy.
The cool aspect of the film is its near future vibe with high tech medical equipment. The ability to use nanomites and 3D print blood and tissue liver using your own DNA is pretty cool. Sofia Boutella was a serious badass in a red dress. The film gets a solid B+ rating in my book.
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Hotel Artemis Review. Featured Image credit: Global Road Entertainment
