Hotel Mumbai is a great crowd pleaser but with a dangerously myopic narrative that, even with its flaws, serves a fitting tribute to the resilience of the people who lived and died through the terror attacks of 2008, but it definitely needs an audience which doesn’t believe everything it sees.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
No amount of words that can convey the sense of the film, because it is such a gut-punch of emotion.
What redeems Hotel Mumbai from morbid opportunism is that, in all but its slickest and most Hollywood moments, the thrills of Maras’ heart-wrenching re-enactment are never an end unto themselves.
The Playlist by Gregory Ellwood
There’s a line for an audience between conveying the true horror of what occurred and being excessive and Maras barely avoids the latter.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
The film is both gripping in its execution — although a two-hours-plus running time feels a bit stretched — and totally bland in what it’s trying to say, with characters who don’t really stand out onscreen.
Sitting through the harrowing events again nearly a decade later could hardly be described as entertainment, and the film plays to many of the same unseemly impulses that make disaster movies so compelling, exploiting the tragedy of the situation for spectacle’s sake.
Screen International by Sarah Ward
Writer/director Anthony Maras largely sticks to the dramatisation playbook, but does so in an effective, affecting and empathetic fashion.