Gimme SHELTER? Statham finds that no man is an island…
Every few weeks young Jessie and her uncle take a boat from the Scottish mainland to a small island where they leave supplies for a lone figure who is happy to be staying away from civilisation. Jessie’s uncle won’t speak to how he knows the man, but tells Jessie to respect the loner’s privacy when she leaves the food for him.
But when a wild storm sinks their boat, Jessie loses her uncle to the waves and she is saved by the mysterious man. His name is Mason and though he helps with Jessie’s injuries, he makes no secret of his annoyance at this unwelcome intrusion.
But a Good Samaritan trip to the mainland goes wrong when the government’s latest tech-breakthrough ‘Thea’ – a system that can cross-reference computers, smart phones and the internet in micro-seconds – identifies Mason as a wanted terrorist responsible for carnage. A Black Ops team is dispatched to find him and kill him… and anyone with him will be considered collateral damage.
Is Mason a terrorist and why do some at MI6 have their own agenda, stopping at nothing to dispose of him? Whatever the truth, Jessie is about to find out that Mason is a very dangerous man…
*some spoilers*
Watching a Jason Statham movie there are certain guarantees. Bruised knuckles, broken bones, pissed-off stares, mumbled threats and a touch of undeniable, self-deprecating charm. His movies, almost always entertaining to varying degrees, could generally all work from a similar synopsis: follicle-challenged, ticking time-bomb variant sets out to unleash some reluctant retribution. So, let’s be honest from the outset… Shelter sticks to the winning formula. It will not win any points for originality – it’s an unapologetic collection of action tropes…but with all due respect to Jason Statham, despite his forever furrowed brow, you don’t tune into any of his movies for existential ponderings. You pay to be entertained. With a script that sometimes feels like it was fed into ChatGPT, it’s Statham’s innate charisma that will keep you watching.
So, it’s not really a stretch or a surprise to see Statham here as a grizzled, bearded loner living alone on an island and keeping people at arms-length for secret reasons ™. Given that, over recent years, he’s played The Beekeeper, The Mechanic, The Transporter and A Working Man, the only surprise is that this isn’t branded as The Lighthouse Keeper.
Long-term film-goers will see the most direct influences: Leon (a killer protects a young girl who he worries wants to be like him – though that’s hardly a unique sub-set at the moment), The Bourne Identity (a government agency sends a relentless killer after our hero to cover-up past misdeeds) and the tv series Person of Interest was one of many to look at the implications of an all-seeing database (though it’s merely a convenient maguffin here). There’s even an argument to be made that if you toned down some of the bone-breaking, this is the kind of pacing that could have made a short mini-series (in fact, the recent Down Cemetery Road has a similar – if less volatile – idea in not dissimilar locations)…
But that sedate pacing is a bit of surprise. Statham usually delivers top-notch close-quarter combat as if it was going out of fashion, but though there are plenty of such scenes to keep the faithful happy, the over-all momentum is fairly restrained, at least to begin with. For a while there’s all the vibe of a self-exiled Jedi knight in a Zen-like retreat (a la Luke Skywalker) though big the gap is between Yoda and Statham is.
Director Ric Roman Waugh is best known for the likes of Greenland and Angel has Fallen which had more epic backdrops and this feels like his attempt to take the action beats and fuse them with a more personal revenge story. The ‘killer with a secret past‘ reveal is only a matter of time, but for the first thirty minutes or so, Statham’s Mason just glowers and mumbles, tucked away in isolation – only jumping into action to save Bodhi Rae Breathnach’s Jessie when absolutely necessary. Statham’s martial-arts achievements are a given, but his genuine talents as a swimmer (one who narrowly missed qualifying for the Olympics) also come into play for the watery rescue and the VFX replicate a Northern Hebrides storm quite effectively.
The windswept isle only lasts so long – rudely interrupted by a Black Ops team. It’s inevitable that we’ll end up on the mainland and after some encounters in the Highlands, we eventually shift to the sky-scraping docklands of London… by the time we reach the third act, Waugh pivots to more expected, typical fare.
Breathnach – most recently seen in the Oscar-nominated Hamnet – is effective as Jessie though the character comes across as that other Hollywood trope, the precocious enfant terrible at first. She quickly brushes off the loss of her uncle and takes to being both the unofficial ward and protector of the only figure offering her any kind of future.
The supporting cast are impressive names but they are given very little to do. The always-welcome Bill Nighy is the obligatory treacherous spy-master pulling the strings, Daniel Mays is Booth, one of Mason’s few allies (and conveniently the man who built the all-seeing computer system Thea) and Mickey 17‘s Naomi Ackie is Roberta, a MI6 commander who starts to realise she’s being used. Bizarrely we even get the great Harriet Walter – wasted as the Prime Minister for just one scene.
For all its familiar attire and creaky script, Statham rarely disappoints, as ever carrying the load well and Shelter turns out to be guilty-pleasure suitable for your beer-and-pizza viewing…
Shelter is available to buy on streaming platforms including Amazon Prime, Fandango At Home and Apple TV.