✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom, United States · 2018
Rated R · 1h 34m
Director Drew Pearce
Starring Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum
Genre Thriller, Science Fiction, Action
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Los Angeles, June 21st, 2028. While the streets are being torn apart by riots, the Nurse, who runs a clandestine hospital for criminals in the penthouse of the Artemis, a closed old hotel, has a rough night dealing with troublemaker clients: thieves, assassins, someone from the past and the one who owns the place and the whole city.
Whether it’s the too-harried pacing or too many central people vying for attention, the film’s heart never quite coalesces. Seizing it is like trying to grab a cloud. Pearce seems to want this movie to be both a neon pulp plot-heavy piece and a character-driven drama, and there’s just not enough time in a single film for all of it to work.
For all of its faults, there’s still plenty here to praise, the result of so much being thrown at the wall is that some of it will stick. Pearce has a sharp creative flair and a head full of ideas but he feels somewhat hemmed in by the constraints of a short running time and a high profile release date.
Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Mr. Pearce is also well-versed in staging and shooting decent action scenes, and building suspense enough to keep Hotel Artemis diverting in its overstuffed ambition. Add to that Ms. Foster’s welcome return to big-screen acting after a five-year layoff and you’ve got a movie almost worth seeing.
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.
New York Daily News by Joe Dziemianowicz
The wannabe thriller set in the near future packs gritty style and ambiance, but that’s no match when the story has no stakes and doesn’t add up.
The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin
The flavorful cast inhabit vividly drawn characters, and, perhaps most of all, the film exudes wall-to-wall, high-grunge atmosphere. That’s a lot of checked-off boxes, and yet the effect is efficiently wild rather than wildly involving, entertaining but not indelible.
Consequence of Sound by Randall Colburn
Drew Pearce‘s Hotel Artemis...falls victim to much of what ails any ensemble picture — rushed plotting, forced coincidence, indulgence — but still manages to make a big impression.
Though it boasts an agreeably preposterous scenario and a weird mixed bag of physicalities and acting styles — from Foster and Sterling K. Brown to Jenny Slate and Dave Bautista — the movie is itself an eye-rolling performance of cyber-pulp tropes and pop-movie excesses that undercuts its spotty pleasures at nearly every turn.
Screen International by Tim Grierson
Like many movies set in colourfully bleak futures, Hotel Artemis can’t sustain the novelty of its initial world-building.
You have to know your enemies before you know your friends.
Welcome to the beginning of you.