"We've Been Here For Twenty-Two Years. This Hospital Was Built On Two Things: Trust And Rules..."
Written and directed by British filmmaker, Drew Pearce, whose previous credits include screenplays for the likes of Iron Man 3 and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Hotel Artemis features a generously stellar cast set as they are whacked slap band in the middle of a dystopian riot zone and forced into the titular, secretive building where entry is gained for members only and is ran with strict rules and regulations by Jodie Foster's (The Silence of the Lambs) Jean Thomas AKA The Nurse. With flashes of neo-noir crime drama and a underlying, wacky black comedic sensibility, Pearce's movie is a strange, tonally manic mess of a movie which sacrifices plot for excruciatingly annoying characters and a narrative through line for dull set pieces, all taking place within a set location which seems to have forgotten to pay the lighting bill, and whilst Pearce in the past has worked alongside the likes of Shane Black, a filmmaker renowned for making dark comedy work successfully, Pearce's debut doesn't take any tips from his cinematic learning curve and is unfortunately a painfully dull and excruciatingly boring waste of ninety minutes in which stuff just happens without any sense of reason or point.
With an opening backdrop which introduces a future-world Los Angeles in which privatisation of the area's water supply has sparked mass rioting and protest from the lower class of the populous, Pearce's movie follows Sterling K. Brown's (Black Panther) Waikiki after a bank heist gone wrong forces him into the Hotel Artemis, an off-the-books NHS for the criminal underworld which reeks heavily of The Continental Hotel influence from the John Wick series. Cue the introduction of Jeff Goldblum's (Thor: Ragnarok) The Wolf King, who seeks vengeance for the theft of his multi-million dollar priced jewels, and soon the action and violence breaks loose, resulting in the likes of Dave Bautista (Spectre), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) and the ever radiant Sofia Boutella (Atomic Blonde) all flexing their action muscles in an attempt to overshadow their meaningless characterisation. With Charlie Day (Pacific Rim: Uprising) once again proving to be the most annoying Hollywood actor currently employed, Hotel Artemis fails on a fundamental movie-making level by not only lacking a straightforward central narrative, but also a movie which doesn't manage to be at all accessible or believable, and by the time the movie crawls its' way to the finish line, it almost felt heavenly to leave the seat in which I had been violently squirming in for the preceding ninety minutes.
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