Hotel Artemis

Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future: Chaos and anarchy reign on the streets, a civil uprising is imminent. Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown) and his team want to take advantage of this situation to rob a bank. But the plan fails and for Waikiki and his badly injured brother there is now only one safe place: the Hotel Artemis, a secret hospital for criminals. The reason this place can exist at all is because the manager (Jodie Foster) has always stubbornly demanded that her guests follow certain rules. So far, that's worked - but foolishly, Waikiki's brother has taken something in the robbery that a particularly powerful and ruthless man wants back. And whether his henchmen will abide by the rules of Hotel Artemis seems questionable.

Hotel Artemis is, at its core, a very good thriller with cult potential. Alright, the hospital with its rules is already very reminiscent of the gangster hotel in the John Wick movies. But detached from that, this dark vision of the future has some really good ideas and atmospheric images, which actually give the flick a great cult potential. The problem is that director Drew Pearce has made it too cramped for just that. It seems as if he wanted to create a cool cult film with all his might, which makes his staging lack the very nonchalance that would have been necessary for the concept to work. As it is, however, Pearce meanders indecisively between hysterical gags, gritty drama and brutal thriller, losing more and more sight of the already thin story.

When the action really picks up towards the end, it's unfortunately already too late. It's not necessarily because of the actors. Jodie Foster is really good as a resolute head nurse with panic attacks, Sterling K. Brown from the drama series This is Us proves to be a pretty cool sock, Dave Bautista is perfectly cast as a muscleman with an iron will to survive and Jeff Goldblum is - just Jeff Goldblum. The only negative here is really that Charlie Day (Kill the Boss) acts even more hysterical than usual, and that Sofia Boutella is again playing just another variation on the role she made famous with in Kingsmen.

Good actors, a promising initial idea, and a really good visual execution help make Hotel Artemis worth watching, all things considered. However, these positives make it even more apparent that there are some clear weaknesses in the script and direction that are responsible for making this action thriller the cool cult film it so obviously would like to be. And that's just disappointing, which in the end leads to the conclusion With cutbacks worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp