By: Corey Lack
Hotel Artemis was a movie released back in 2018. It starred Jodie Foster, Jeff Goldblum, and Sterling K. Brown. The plot of the movie revolved around the titular hotel being a black market hotel/hospital where those with memberships and don’t want to risk going to legal hospitals can go to get treatment no questions asked. On one fateful night, while riots against the privatization of water raged outside, a number of criminals from different walks of life find themselves converging on the hotel at the same time, like a pair of bank robbing brothers, an international assassin, an arms dealer, and a ruthless crime lord. The whole time Jodie Foster’s character is trying to maintain order in her hotel, assisted by her nurse, Everest, who is played by Dave Bautista.
On the surface, the movie has a lot of good ideas. The idea of a black market hotel/hospital in a futuristic version of Los Angeles certainly opens up a lot of intriguing plotlines, especially when you add in the different characters, like Brown’s mastermind/bank robber and Bautista’s extremely loyal Everest. That said, none of these characters, save for Foster’s character, gets any sort of development. The assassin does her assassin thing and, once the job’s done, decides to help her friend escape, which is in line with her professional, but warm-blooded character, Everest puts himself between harm and the doctor even in the end, and so on. The only development that happens is Foster’s Doctor Thomas getting over her agoraphobia and killing the man who killed her son. Also, none of the characters were really interesting enough to carry the movie and all together, it just became a jumbled mess.
There was also a problem with the plot. This is that there were so many different plotlines that were occurring all at once. The assassin had to do her job, the doctor had to get over her agoraphobia, the bank robbers had to get healed before escaping the city, and the crime boss needed treatment, which doesn’t even take into account the frequent references to the riots going on outside the building. All of these were happening in disjointed, separate plotlines and when it switched between the plotlines it was so sudden and abrupt it would take a minute or two to get drawn back into the story.
On top of these problems, the effects and camera work were nothing to write home about. In short, the movie missed the mark on multiple fronts and failed as a result. I went into this movie expecting something along the lines of a movie focused on the Continental from the John Wick movies, but instead I got a movie that felt more like an anthology that sort of merged together in the end. I give it three broken cups out of ten.
