Shelter (now on Starz) finds director Ric Roman Waugh shifting his attention from generic Gerard Butler action vehicles to a similar 4WD pickup truck on the same lot: generic Jason Statham vehicles. For much of the past decade, Statham toiled in the borderline-IP mines (Fast/Furious, The Meg, Guy Ritchie flicks), then, with stuff like The Beekeeper and A Working Man, began challenging Liam Neeson to see who’s the king of low-expectation aging-action-star dad movies. Note to Waugh and other makers of movies residing in this sub-genre: Statham is best when he’s smirking beneath the mean mug.
SHELTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Michael Mason (Statham) is the keeper of a lighthouse that’s been out of commission for years. That’s pretty much all you need to know about the guy, but Shelter piles on the cliches anyway: His existence on this lonely windswept Scottish island makes the lives of sad divorced Movie Cops dwelling in spartan apartments cluttered with empty beer bottles (crappy domestics; no IPAs or anything fancy like that) and half-eaten takeout boxes of chop suey look like Marie Antoinette lying on a fainting couch being hand-fed macarons by servants. Mike sits in his shack eating grey porridge and glugging vodka, playing chess with nobody, sleeping in his boots, stocking cap and omnipresent cable knit sweater. Now, he’s not a total monster; he has a dog, at least. He didn’t give the dog a name, which, you know, sucks for the dog, but hey, Clint Eastwood didn’t have a name in those Westerns and he got along just fine, right?
Occasionally, a boat arrives and a young-teen girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) drops a fresh crate of porridge and vodka on his doorstep. He never greets her, choosing to look mournfully from afar. She leaves him a little gift-wrapped box that he pushes aside and refuses to open. THERE IS NO JOY ALLOWED ON THIS PREMISES. WE’RE DRINKIN’ OURSELVES TO DEATH HERE. He carries himself like he believes he deserves nothing except gruel and booze and the curdled contents of his mind, and probably almost maybe the occasional expression of unconditional love from the dog. One day a storm whips up right after Jessie’s delivery. The boat sinks, her uncle sinks beneath the roiling waves, and Mike finally has something to do, namely, saving the girl from drowning, and nursing her and her nasty injured ankle back to health.
To say Mike’s bedside manner is a bit wanting is an understatement. Jessie’s inclination as soon as he steps out is to hobble into the kitchen and find a knife to stash under her pillow. This is the thinnest of diversionary nonsense of course, because we know the Deathless Statham Persona includes a heart of gold beneath the 12-grit sandpaper demeanor, and she quickly warms to him and his stodgy acts of kindness. There’s even a moment where he almost seems like he’s thinking about considering smiling. Will you be shocked to learn that Mike’s secretly a — don’t gasp too loudly here — deadly former MI6 agent who’s essentially unkillable? No. No, you will not.
We learn this after he ventures to the mainland for medicine for Jessie and he triggers a supergross government high-tech Big Brother surveillance system that prompts some honchos into action: Roberta Frost (Naomie Ackie) stands in front of a bank of monitors and minions at terminals, barking orders to snatch Mike. Another honcho is a former official honcho who’s working off the books, Stephen Manafort (Bill Nighy), who orders an assassin (Bryan Vigier) to stop at nothing — he’ll even kill cops if he has to — to take out Mike and the girl who’s so disarmingly quick to adopt a new father figure no matter how tortured his soul may be. It’s them against the world, and when one of them is played by Jason Statham, the world doesn’t stand a chance.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What was that one Liam Neeson movie in which he plays an old tough guy with a young person he’s protecting? Ice Road: Retriabsolugeance Pursuit? This stuff all runs together, is what I’m trying to say here. As ever, the keystone action franchises of the 21st century are reference points – Bourne and Wick in the traumatized-loner/headshot-expert sweepstakes, Mission: Impossible in the pointlessly convoluted skullduggery – although you’ll be wise to draw from the earlier Statham filmography – e.g. The Transporter, The Mechanic, Parker and many more – for a more accurate comparison in terms of quality.
Performance Worth Watching: Giving Shelter a rooting interest just with her expressive eyes, Breathnach gives us serious Saoirse Ronan vibes. Breathnach, who managed to be memorable in Hamnet despite existing beneath Jessie Buckley’s all-consuming performance, will see this movie as a side jaunt before what seems to be an inevitable breakout with roles in a new Sense and Sensibility adaptation and Robert Eggers’ Werwulf.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Nighy, proving worthy of another paycheck, describes this Statham character as “a prodigy… the gold standard” of his blacker-than-black-ops unit. “He’s a precision instrument,” Nighy pontificates with Shakespearean gravitas. “There’s no stopping him.” I bet he could royally fuck up a giant prehistoric shark that’s bigger than the biggest whale ever, too. This is to say Statham is not challenged by any of this material, which fits him like, say, I dunno, a cable knit sweater/stocking cap combo on a self-loathing lighthouse keeper with no lighthouse to keep.
Ward Parry’s screenplay seems pieced together from a half-dozen other films and gives Statham and Breathnach plenty of tortured dialogue to breathlessly line-read. Waugh is a workmanlike, rock-solid action director whose high-floor/low-ceiling projects teeter on the line between forgettable and respectable. Statham is better when asked to season his sulking and grim stares with camp, but he’s just as acceptably fine playing it straight like this. And Breathnach’s performance gives us the impression of a chess champion in the making being asked to play checkers; if there’s a reason to watch Shelter beyond some pretty acceptably decent action sequences, it’s her.
No fault of the cast is the frustrating manner in which these characters communicate, feebly dancing around their wants and needs, or how there’s little explanation for why capital-T They want to kill the girl, thus prompting Mike to drag her along on a lengthy, significantly violent child-endangerment excursion during which she clings to life in the backseat as he plays smash-up derby with an assassin, and he dead-eye deadshots baddies who are using her as a shield. At least that makes more sense than the ridiculous semi-subplot about the pointlessly tangled web of conspirators conspiring within a conspiracy to conspiracize the Statham character. Does the movie realize this is all unnecessary drivel padding out a movie that exists so its star can use guns, fists, a knife, a fireplace poker, a really big chain, etc. against various shitheads? It makes the movie sag a bit in the middle like an old cable knit sweater. But at least we’re never too bored with it.
Our Call: Shelter was pretty much made to be a fully serviceable Dad Movie on Starz. It knows its place. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.