BELATED OPENING-WEEKEND REVIEW OF 'HOTEL ARTEMIS'

But an extremely cool retro paperback poster artwork YEAR: 2018

Many have compared HOTEL ARTEMIS to JOHN WICK because of the hotel for criminals, which is just window-dressing here as this dingy palace actually serves as a hospital for injured, high-paying criminal club members, and the plot does sound intriguing but remains a benign foundation for a rushed action-caper just as the hotel itself harbors its crooked clientele...

Hotel Score: *1/2

The hardly Noir-ambiguous good-bad people may as well wear endearing, audience-friendly halos, especially Jodie Foster as a boozy nurse along with a really cool and mellow black thief who discovers he stole far too much from the wrong people ala CHARLEY VARRICK, combined with a superhuman Kung Fu chick taking down lethal henchman ala KILL BILL, while a broader homage is a complete "out" for the suspense: the movie takes place in a familiar dystopic near-future resembling ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK where a riotous mob is tearing up the city because a corporation stole their water i.e. CHINATOWN...

All this a contrived attempt to instill a sense of urgency outside since there's little to none inside... For example, the Nurse's various ER rooms (named after idyllic holiday spots), during what are supposed to be edgy and intense surgeries to mend the badly wounded, are replete with miraculous, robotic, push-button machines that Dr. McCoy from STAR TREK would envy: Leaving an extremely old and haggard-looking, cliché-neurotic, overacting Foster to seem useless and alone even during unexpected peril — although she's never actually in real danger thanks to...

Bottom of the Vintage Paperback poster-artwork

Dave Bautista, obviously created to "steal scenes" as a tough but tender bodyguard named Everest (because he's big... like the mountain) while the bad-bad guys include smack-talking weapons-dealer Charlie Day (sounding like Joe Pesci imitating a knee-jerk's vision of Donald Trump) and Jeff Goldblum as a powerful crime lord needing emergency-emergency service but, whether these people live or die really doesn't matter all that much. The eventual twists, turns and revelations occur within a clunky, patched-together 92-minute run-time: seeming like glimpses of a season-long cable series that'd require time to grow beyond this dull, misguided, stagey mess that repeats itself over and over, again and again, and hardly even attempts to get off (or even on) the ground-floor. 

Another example of the awesome retro posters (American Gigolo) for such a let-down picture