Shelter
Cast: Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Bill Nighy, Naomi Ackie
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Star rating: ★★★
Where to stream: Lionsgate Play
Jason Statham gets one of the meatiest parts of his career in Shelter, the new action thriller from Ric Roman Waugh. It is a role tailor-made for the action star, and Shelter gives him all the chops to deliver in the slick and handsomely styled set pieces.
The premise
The opening minutes are a clincher. In a wordless montage of sorts, we spot Statham’s Mason, a lonely fugitive hiding away on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, with only his German shepherd for company. Every week, he is provided supplies by a fishing trawler (Michael Shaeffer) and his orphaned niece Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who was one of the kids in Hamnet), but he is not interested in making any form of connection or even just saying ‘thank you.’ Until disaster strikes at bay, and the boat capsizes. Jesse is rescued by Mason, who also delivers the news that her uncle has drowned. (Later, even the dog meets a terrible fate, and I am tired of seeing films where animals are used just for the sake of company and then rejected. It is not funny.)
Left to care for the young girl, Mason has to arrange for medicine and tend to her wound. This little spark of kindness backfires for Mason, as he is tracked on the mainland within a minute (thanks to social media and reels). This immediately triggers MI6 to track him down.
More secrets are revealed in a rather predictable subplot involving a former spy-chief (Bill Nighy), even as the hunt for Mason gets falsely tagged as one of the terrorists that needs to be eliminated. The head of M16 (Naomi Ackie in a forgettable role) is working overtime to get this under control. Soon enough, assassins are crawling up the remote island like bees, and Mason has no other choice but to leave and protect himself and the orphaned girl.
What works
Jason Statham knows how to play Mason like it’s second skin to him, and sure enough, he delivers the goods in the action set pieces, which are aplenty in Shelter. The action choreography is superb, especially in a deadly nightclub shootout sequence that does little to spare the viewer with a heightened background score. These action sequences are often violent and grisly, but in recent years, the penchant for on-screen violence has left little room for subtlety. Hence, who is complaining as long as the hero survives? I find the rhetoric ultimately troublesome, but there’s little to interrogate when there’s no space left for reflection.
Shelter could have improved a lot better if the screenplay had tried to let go of the beaten formula. The characters are often deadpan and given cliche-ridden dialogues with no psychological depth. Jesse soon gets over the death of her uncle, and a late-stage revelation does little to help her case with the hunt. Statham confidently makes use of his physical presence even when the script barely demands it, overcompensating for the deadly retaliation of a skilled fighter who needs to survive at any cost. Even within the formulaic corners of the script, Shelter remains steady and engaging.