There are quite a few reasons why ‘Hotel Artemis‘, the 2018 film by first time director Drew Pearce, would be worth seeing. First of all, the cast, in which Jodie Foster appears for the first time after a five-year break (her previous film was also a sci-fi action dystopia – Hotel Artemis) but also Jeff Goldblum, Sofia Boutella, and others. The design and cinematography as we can guess from the posters and ‘trailers’ are interesting and it is obvious that money and talent have been invested in them. The idea is quite original and many of the characters that appear on the screen bring with them interesting stories. And yet, the film disappoints. I believe that the main problem is in the script. The concept is underdeveloped and many of the heroes disappear before we have time to care about them. Most of the films that come out of American studios nowasays suffer from excessive length, because the addition of many minutes, sometimes tens of minutes, which unnecessarily prolong viewing times. ‘Hotel Artemis‘ suffers from being too short. With less than 90 minutes of actual screening time, the film fails to say all that needs to be said, and the ratio between content and action is excessively unbalanced in favor of the action, which itself is violent but not spectacular or original enough to compensate.
Los Angeles, the City of Angels of 2028 is in flames, with demonstrations and violent confrontations opposing the police and the army on one side, and the population rebelled against corporations and the economic and ecological crisis on the other side. Criminals control the streets. There is no running water, the power outages hotpermanently and a night curfew is imposed. The ‘Nurse’, a rather old woman (Jodie Foster wearing a sperical make-up designed to make her look older) takes care of the Artemis Hotel, furnished in the ‘Art Deco’ style which is actually a hospital that takes care of injured criminals. Fate brings simmultaneously in the hotel that night two gangster brotherst who just commited a burglary, a paid assassin, the injured local mob boss who is also the owner of the hotel and a seriously injured policewoman who is also linked to the nurse’s biography and tragic events decades ago. Confrontations are inevitable and the fate of the institution, which was a kind of cease-fire oasis in which weapons and conflicts are left at the entrance, is called into question.
The cinematic qualities and the remarkable stylish sets of the film are not enough to compensate for the lack of consistency of the story. Not even the main character, the Nurse, manages to convince, although she benefits from most of the time on screen and from Jodie Foster‘s acting performance.’Hotel Artemis‘ looks more like a sketch of a dystopian action film than the film itself. I think that it’s just the spectators interested only in the scenes of violent action who will come out, maybe, satisfied from watching. This does not require so much talen invested in acting or creating sets. The others, that is us, we will wait for the full movie.