Starring Jodi Foster. Rated 18A

It’s 2028 L.A., and the Hotel Artemis is a fortress against the violence outside: streets exploding in a bloodbath of rioting, police decked out like RoboCop, and nonstop gunfire and explosions. Vaulted off to anyone but members, the high-rise is a secret high-tech hospital for wounded criminals. And did we mention it’s a grand altar to the art-deco movement?

So it is with the strange, stylized directorial debut of Drew Pearce (who wrote Iron Man 3): over-the-top art design meets over-the-top violence and characters. The film’s marketing geniuses have aptly coined the look “digital deco”; think dim sepia lighting and computer screens. Wounded assassins, bank robbers, and arms dealers are assigned rooms with the names of exotic places—Honolulu, Nice, Hollywood—with giant murals to match.

At the centre of it all is Jodi Foster, the gruff and frumpy septuagenarian Nurse who runs this establishment under strict rules. Foster is in her element here, in orthopedic shoes, hospital whites, and reader glasses. Her character heals criminals with the latest computer technology and 3-D printers, but loves playing the Mamas & the Papas on her old vinyl-record player. She (perhaps understandably) suffers paralyzing agoraphobia. Flashbacks hint that a loss in her own life has pushed her to devote herself to healing others—though why she’s helping these miscreants is hard to reconcile.

Any cast that dares to mix the mighty Foster with Dave Bautista as a no-shit orderly and Jeff Goldblum as a gang boss named the Wolf King should have potential. Add in Sofia Boutella as a red-gowned, martial-arts-master assassin and Charlie Day as an insecure, half-crazed arms dealer and you should be well on your way to fun, retro-futuristic excess.

But for all its deco-dystopian flair and cartoon-scale characters, Hotel Artemis lacks one key ingredient: momentum. In a brief setup outside the hotel, Sterling K. Brown’s bank robber ends up stealing a priceless item that belongs to the ruthless Wolf King. That’s meant to set off ample terror when they’re trapped together in the building. And, admittedly, it leads to one ingenious bit of nasty business, in which the 3-D printer turns into a weapon. But the bulk of the tension seems to stem from whether the Nurse will be able to keep a lid on her unruly patients.

So come for the outrageous setup, come for the eye candy, and come for Foster’s thoroughly nontraditional heroine. Just don’t expect to be glued to your seat for the wild ride the trailers are promising. Unless you have a serious thing for art-deco fixtures.