Hotel Artemis: A Film So Bad, That By the Time Goldblum Appears, I Groaned Knowing He Could Not Save It
- john raymond
- Jul 12
- 3 min read
There are bad films, and then there are films that are so structurally confused, so dramatically inert, so devoid of pulse or point, that even a surprise appearance from Jeff Goldblum—one of cinema’s great agents of chaos and charisma—induces not joy, but dread.
Hotel Artemis is exactly that kind of failure. By the time Goldblum strolls into frame, suavely snarling as the feared “Wolf King of L.A.,” the audience has already realized something critical: this movie is not sick or struggling. It is dead. Goldblum, for all his charm and wit, is merely here to put on the sunglasses at the funeral.
From its opening moments, Hotel Artemis pretends to be a movie with ambition. A near-future Los Angeles consumed by riot. A secret members-only hospital for criminals. A tightly ruled sanctuary with dangerous patients, hidden agendas, and a violent world trying to claw its way in. The premise suggests pressure, collision, moral ambiguity. But none of that ever arrives. Instead, the film plods through its runtime with the dramatic momentum of a broken treadmill, introducing characters who neither evolve nor matter, stacking lore atop lore without consequence, and enforcing rules that are immediately forgotten. The riot outside might as well be on another planet. The hotel feels not trapped or sacred, but disconnected from the film’s own stakes.
Jodie Foster, in what could have been a powerful role, plays Nurse Jean Thomas with the fidgety detachment of someone waiting for the script to give her a reason to exist. She has a backstory—her son died, she hasn’t left the hotel in years—but it amounts to nothing. She is our central figure, and yet she does not shape the outcome. She does not enact revenge. She does not forgive. She does not drive the narrative forward. She maintains. That’s her entire arc: she lays down rules and then watches as others break them. Her choices are circumstantial, not decisive. She is a protagonist who does not cause the ending—a mortal sin in cinematic storytelling.
Characters around her arrive with the promise of tension. Sterling K. Brown’s Waikiki is a professional criminal with a dying brother. Sofia Boutella’s Nice is an assassin with a secret mission. Dave Bautista’s Everest is the towering orderly with a soft heart and a tragic rigidity. But none of these characters are given arcs. They are conceptually interesting, but dramatically useless. They don’t pursue goals. They don’t struggle against opposition. They don’t change. Even their deaths, when they come, land without force because we never felt these people as real. They are not characters. They are ideas, tossed into a set, shuffled around, and then discarded.
And then comes Goldblum. Late in the film, far too late, he arrives. The mythic Wolf King. A kingpin, a father figure, a symbol of the very violence and corruption that necessitated the sanctuary of the Artemis. He should be the storm arriving at the gates. He should test the Nurse’s resolve, force a reckoning, bring the themes of power, grief, and moral compromise into focus. Instead, he delivers a few lines, smirks in Goldblumian fashion, and is promptly killed by someone else. Not by the protagonist. Not even as part of a climax. Just dispatched, like an errand. When he appeared, I didn’t feel relief—I groaned. Not because he was bad, but because I knew it would be wasted. I knew even he couldn’t save it.
The truth is, by the time Goldblum arrives, the film has already surrendered any claim to meaning. The riot is background noise. The rules are cosmetic. The characters are unresolved. The structure is shot, the pacing sluggish, the mood aimless. It is all concept, no conflict. Style with no soul. It wants to be John Wick meets Casablanca, but ends up a slow, sterile episode of a show that never aired. Even the final emotional beats feel unearned. People die. A door opens. The Nurse leaves. Roll credits. Nothing was risked, nothing was won, and nothing was felt.
Hotel Artemis is a movie that tricks you into thinking it has a pulse. But it doesn’t. It has good lighting. A cast full of talent. A decent score. And a fascinating premise. But that’s all it has. It lacks story, it lacks struggle, it lacks any kind of emotional resolution. It is a beautifully lit hallway with no doors.
So yes, when Jeff Goldblum finally walked on screen, I groaned. Not because he did anything wrong. But because I knew the truth: by the time he arrived, it was far too late.
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