Hotel Artemis

Hotel Artemis, the directorial debut from Drew Pearce – best known for his screenwriting efforts on Iron Man 3 and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation – is a strikingly atmospheric sci-fi neo-noir that never quite delivers on all its potential. The setting is 2028 LA. Not for the first time in cinematic dystopia, the City of Angels finds itself the hub of civil unrest. Water has been privatised, mass rioting abounds and crime has soared.

The “Hotel” Artemis serves an exclusively criminal elite clientele under the intrepid direction of the wry, agoraphobic Nurse (Jodie Foster). With help from her orderly – and muscle – Everest (Dave Bautista, playing another endearing gentle giant), the Nurse must navigate one particularly busy night attending to brothers Sherman (Sterling K. Brown) and Lev (Brian Tyree Henry), injured after a robbery gone wrong; a mysterious French assassin (Sofia Boutella); a hippie mob boss called the Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum); and Morgan (Jenny Slate) – a figure from the Nurse’s troubled past who's now a cop and whose presence at the Artemis could endanger them all.

Despite its compelling premise, the film’s futuristic framework rarely rises above draping. The ongoing riots serve as little more than mood-builder and Pearce never fully defines the stakes. Fortunately he leans hard into the film’s strengths, namely its easy humour and conventional but rousing fight sequences. It also trades on a dizzying amount of charm from its winning cast doing what they each do best: Brown and Goldblum are charismatic as ever, Boutella wonderfully magnetic, and Bautista predictably gets the best one-liners (“I am a healthcare professional!” among them). Only Foster plays against type in a mannered, unexpectedly engaging performance, at home among all the kookiness.

For all its structural flaws, Hotel Artemis makes for a wildly entertaining edition to the summer blockbuster line-up.

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Released 20 July by Warner Bros