In Hotel Artemis, Jodie Foster breaks a five year acting hiatus to try to create a great cartoon. Apparently caricature over character is the only acting worth doing in the age of the Marvel tent pole. So Foster slowly short-shuffles along, dispensing medicine and wisecracks, performing CGI aided surgery, being gruff yet fearful while waiting for the plot to catch up with her slightly tragic 22 year old back story as to why she is the sole nurse practitioner in a hospital dedicated to the wounded and dues paying criminal elite.
David Pearce, the screen scribe of a Mission Impossible and Iron Man sequel, stays true to his roots and makes his directing debut look and feel like a grunge tone graphic novel. Foul mouth and over confident gangsters, international female assassins, domestic hit men with fuckup siblings, kingpins with hot triggered heirs that have daddy inferiority complexes, a city in riot mode, and Dave Bautista channeling Drax 2X, make for an over emoting ensemble that tries to keep up with the overheated plot. Jeff Goldblum even shows up to play yet another Jeff Goldblum character variation.
The whole movie never settles and gets a chance to click in any comical and dramatic way.
Hotel Artemis has wind but no howl. It is too smart to believe its artifice. Too dumb to know how to make it real.
